The Wolf of Wall Street

The Wolf of Wall Street is a minor work by a great filmic novelist. It’s a long movie, like one of those tomes by Dickens or Balzac that had never even heard of the jump cut. The direct address to the viewer  and the interior monologues which are novelistic modes of disquisition might also derive from the fact that the movie is based on an autobiographical work by Jordan Belfort (played in the movie by Leonardo DiCaprio). Belfort’s scam was the underwriting and selling of so-called penny stocks. His career begins on Black Monday, October 19, l987, the day the stock market fell 508 points and the old line firm L.F. Rothschild, where he’d been hired for his first legitimate job, tanked. “I want you to deal with your problems by becoming richer,” Belfort tells the employees of Stratton Oakmont, the auspicious sounding firm he later creates. Actually his story is one of addiction to both money and drugs, specifically Quaaludes and cocaine. There’s an image that’s used in the ads for the film, of DiCaprio on his knees licking the high heel of a blond. That blond turns out to be his second wife, Naomi (Margot Robbie), and the scene is one in which she takes her vengeance on his repeated infidelity with prostitutes by both depriving him of sex and threatening to increase the torture by walking around the house without underpants. There are a number of other scenes like this which tell the whole story in microcosm including one where Belfort is so paralyzed by Quaaludes that he can’t warn his cohort Ronnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) that the F.B.I. is bugging their conversations. Here the particular little device has to do with a piece of telephone wire which acts as a noose. So what is Scorsese getting at as he flourishes these metaphors of submission and entrapment? Besides the addiction leitmotif, it’s hard to tell. The canvas is large, but also unutterably small, reducing human existence to the striving for money and power. Scorsese triages his users, but the result is antiseptic and emotionless. There's something missing in this tale of avarice among the cast of outer borough characters. Maybe it’s just the pubic hair on Jordan’s second wife. Along with Black Monday, the advent of Brazilian hot waxing is another of the losses which the film records.

Taxi Driver

Robert De Niro recapitulates his iconic scene from Taxi Driver, where he fires on imagined enemies, in Raging Bull, where as Jake LaMotta at the end of his career, having lost everything, he stands alone in the dressing room of a theater reinventing himself as a monologist. Martin Scorsese, who has done for modern American film what the ancient Greeks did for drama, himself appears in the film, in a voyeuristic sequence that recalls Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Hitchcock played cameo roles in all his films, and the score for Taxi Driver was composed by Bernard Hermann, who did the scores for Vertigo and Psycho. Taxi Driver’s ensemble—with Albert Brooks, Cybill Shepherd, Leonard Harris (playing the presidential candidate Charles Palantine) and Harvey Keitel and Jodie Foster, playing the hooker/pimp team of Easy and Sport—is the ’70s equivalent of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre. Then there’s the New York of the ’70s, which is itself a character in the film. Remember the Belmore Cafeteria on 28th and Park Avenue South, The Terminal Bar opposite the Port Authority, Variety Photo Plays on 14th and Third, Playland and Fascination on the deuce? And let’s not forget the guns: the .44 Magnum (making a guest appearance after an earlier performance in Dirty Harry), the .38 snub-nose, the .380 Walther, the .25 Colt automatic. Betsy (Cybill Shepherd ) says Travis reminds her of Kris Kristofferson’s lyrics: “He's a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.” The only thing missing in Scorsese’s masterpiece, which is currently in revival at Film Forum in a new 35mm restoration, is Deney Terrio’s Dance Fever, a glaring absence in a film that defies the categories of both truth and fiction. Richard Donner’s Conspiracy Theory, about an unstable taxi driver (Mel Gibson) obsessed with Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, is only one of many American films that would never have been made without Taxi Driver. In the case of Conspiracy Theory, however, the part got away from the actor playing the lead, and life ended up imitating art.

Public Speaking

Fran Lebowitz gave us Metropolitan Life and Social Studies and now Martin Scorsese has directed a movie about Lebowitz’s life with the equally pithy title, Public Speaking. Public speaking, by Lebowitz’s definition, is the kind of mouthing-off that she was told to “take back” as a rebellious youth and is now rewarded for as a celebrity aphorist and salonista who holds court at the trendy Waverly Inn. Martin Buber’s I-Thou and I-It get reinterpreted in Lebowitz’s Weltaunshaung as “them and us,” the in-crowd being the world of hip, gay New Yorkers of the 1970s—a discerning audience that is all but gone. It is hard to give much credence to Lebowitz’s fiats about the state of culture in the post-AIDS world when in fact great American writers like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Nicholson Baker, David Foster Wallace, Toni Morrison (who appears as an interlocutor in the film), Susanna Moore, Lorrie Moore and Joyce Carol Oates have attended to a serious and discerning following who all survived the scourge of AIDS. But Lebowitz nevertheless renders all kinds of verbal gems, the digestibility of which lie in inverse proportion to the global nature of their import. She refers to her notorious writers block as “blockade,” comparing it to the Vietnam war. “I don’t know how I got into it and I don’t know how to get out of it.” The problem with “being ahead of your time,” complains Lebowitz, is that “by the time everyone gets around to you, you’re bored.” About self-expression she remarks, “When Toni Morrison said ‘write the book you want to read,’ she didn’t mean everyone.” About New York: “If you run into a New Yorker in Times Square, it’s like running into someone in a gay bar in the ’70s. You make excuses.” Lebowitz is our generation’s Oscar Wilde, an anti-Christ whose salvos act as an enema, cleansing the system of sententiousness and milquetoast humanism. She can’t understand how gays want to defend their right to marriage and to be in the military, two institutions that she equates with “slavery,” and she believes second hand cigarette smoke is more sinned against than sinner. Lebowitz is a Luddite who claims that her refusal to use cell phones, Blackberries and computers enables her to live in the present more effectively than sufferers of modernity. But she drives a Checker cab and is hopelessly lost in her nostalgia about two pasts—the first being the age of Algonquin wits, after whom she plainly fashions herself, and the second the disco age of the ’70s, when doormen to nightclubs, standing behind velvet ropes, became the arbiters of sensibility.

Diasporic Dining XXII (Escalation)

Escalation is when you say, “I had lunch with Marty Scorsese,” and your envious old college buddy, who has just arrived in town from Des Moines, says, “No way! Gag me with a spoon! How cool is that???” And you go on to describe the meeting you had with Scorsese at The Waverly Inn. “Funny, I don’t know what the hoopla is all about. I thought the mac 'n' cheese with truffles was mediocre and the only celebrity I saw was Chloe Sevigny, whose fellatio scene in The Brown Bunny was a bore. I’m as voyeuristic as the next person, but once I’ve got the idea I don’t feel the need to revisit the same territory. Actually Scorsese spotted me at the gym. I still like to work the speed bag and I think he was planning to do some kind of boxing film, not really a sequel to Raging Bull, but something about this middle aged Jewish guy who is generally upset and goes to the gym to work out his aggressions. You know how these directors are—I looked perfect for the role and he figured I was going to be another Cathy Moriarity, but then the script was changed and I didn’t get role. Anyway, we went back to Scorsese’s place for a nightcap after dinner and he introduced me to his former wife Isabella Rossellini and showed me his Oscar, and now here I am.” 

The Leopard

“For this to remain the same, everything must change.” Prince Don Fabrizio Salina (Burt Lancaster) repeats these words two times in Luchino Visconti’s screen adaptation of Giuseppe Tomaso di  Lampedusa’s masterpiece The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), currently in revival at Film Forum. The paradoxical sounding utterance are the words of both an idealist, who longs for a world that no longer exists, and a consummate practitioner of realpolitik. The film, which is being shown in a magnificent new print courtesy of Martin Scorsese, is remarkably faithful to the complexity of the original novel. Set against the Risorgimento, in which Garibaldi overthrew the old Bourbon order, unifying Italy under Victor Emmanuel, The Leopard is a complex portrayal of the decline of the old aristocracy, represented by Salina, and the rise of a new middle class, represented in the character of Don Calogero Sedara (Paolo Stoppa), the mayor of Donnafugata, the small Sicilian town where the film is set. His beautiful daughter (Claudia Cardinale) marries the Prince’s nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon), himself a striver and a representative of the new world, with its freedoms, its opportunism and its labile sense of values. At one point, the Prince gives an audience to a representative of the new government, who epitomizes the enlightenment values of progress in his attempt to bring modernity to the South. Refusing to accept an appointment to the senate, Salina says about Sicilians, “Their sensuality is a longing for oblivion.” Visconti and Lampedusa, whose work was rejected for publication in his own lifetime, were both aristocrats, and while it’s impossible to make unknowable generalizations about the inner lives of dead artists, one can’t help but feel that the movie and the novel reflect an almost conservative bias toward irrational truths about human beings that defeat the notion of change.  

Raging Bull

The locution “the revival of Raging Bull” is quaint when you think about it. But the movie is indeed making a comeback, like its subject made when he reinvented himself as a performer—a transition that, at least according to Scorsese’s film, didn’t come as easily to him as his stalking style of fighting. There is a term in boxing called “walking your man down,” which is what Jake LaMotta did in the brilliantly recreated Sugar Ray Robinson bouts, which are right up there with Foreman and Ali, Ali and Frazier, Hagler and Hearns and, most recently, Gatti and Ward. Parenthetically, there is something about Arturo Gatti’s tragic end (was it suicide or homicide?) that is reminiscent of the decline of LaMotta that Raging Bull depicts. Fighters pay a price. Jerry Quarry suffered brain damage and one wonders if Ali’s Parkinson’s, like LaMotta’s severe paranoia, was a result of all the blows he took. In his last bout with Sugar Ray, he simply dropped his hands and endured the fury of his opponent’s punches. He couldn’t win that fight, but his victory was to walk over to Sugar Ray’s corner and taunt him with the fact that he never went down. In one scene in the film, the then new-comer and Scorsese discovery Cathy Moriarity, playing LaMotta’s bride-to-be, says to Robert De Niro’s LaMotta, “Nice car.” “Like that car?” LaMotta responds. “It’s nice,” she says. The exchange takes place through the fence outside a public swimming pool in the Bronx. The romance takes off, but the lines, which were plainly improvised, are like the reverse of the expression “a picture speaks a thousand words.” In this case, a few muted words conjure a thousand images. At the end of the film, the once trim LaMotta is now an overweight has-been, rehearsing Marlon Brando’s famous lines from On the Waterfront, “I coulda been a contender.” The words are comparatively pithy, but the great genius of De Niro, practicing in front of a mirror like fighters shadow box (and reminiscent of his performance in Taxi Driver), is in communicating so much more than what is said.