Irreviews

I saw The Broken Circle Breakdown at the Quad two nights ago. It is so perfectly awful it’s almost enough to turn you off movies altogether. I want to make a few remarks about this, because as you know this film is Oscar nominated in the category of Best Foreign Film.

The Broken Circle Breakdown is about a dirt-bag couple who sing in a Belgian bluegrass band. The couple’s daughter is diagnosed, and eventually dies of, leukemia, they both go totally fucking insane, their marriage falls apart, and she kills herself. The band’s musical performances are scattered as interludes amongst the emotional mayhem, but these interludes do not relate or tie strongly (or at all) to the film’s story or emotional content – they kind of just take up time. This is one of those movies where the filmmakers are totally obsessed with the literal representation of people’s speech and actions (eschewing all development of character or ideas), in this particular case focusing on the couple’s inarticulate, incoherent rage and pain. The problem is, this is dreadfully boring and pointlessly depressing. What is the value of art if it does not expand or enrich our view of the world or of ourselves in some way? The sole message of this film is: “if you’re kid ever dies, you’re fucking fucked!” Are people really in need of this message?

The film received its dumbfounding Oscar nomination for three reasons. First, the Academy has a soft spot for films with a lot of screaming and emoting – appreciation of subtly is definitely not their strong suit. Second, it features all the (English language) bluegrass music performances, which I suppose for some may give the film an illusion of profundity. Third, it features pathetic but undeniable “political content”, linked to the Bush administration’s stem cell legislation; but they really have nothing interesting to say about this, and in the end it merely provides verbiage for the guy’s various screaming meltdowns.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to see a film called Old Goats, at Cinema Village. It was so bad we felt kind of embarrassed for having gone to it, and I couldn’t even bring myself to review it. Now, having taken in the much-lauded Broken Circle Breakdown, I can say that I am no longer embarrassed to have seen Old Goats, which, retarded as it was, did at least try to find humor, perspective, dignity and meaning in its topic (old age). I don’t know how embarrassed I feel to have seen The Broken Circle Breakdown -a bit, maybe. But I definitely feel very sorry that I saw it.

The Monuments Men is quite bad. The filmmakers take an interesting but very limited story idea (the Nazis stole art during the war, but we found most of it, and pretty easily) and they stretch it out over two hours in a way that kills all suspense, all intellectual interest,  and all emotional resonance. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a dignified historical topic butchered in quite this manner. The script is absolutely horrendous, not only chock full of insipid filler and embarrassing and needless attempts at humor, but also devoid of any substantive or convincing historical content. Character development is even worse, too shallow even for caricature! The score is trite and tacky in the extreme. And the men’s program to save western Europe’s art comes across as entirely hair-brained and reckless, succeeding mainly through dumb luck. If they actually wanted to honor these men and their accomplishments in this film, something went horribly wrong.

Nevertheless, Monuments Men was somehow not completely unwatchable. The cast is comprised of charismatic, big-name actors who are also skilled enough to function as character actors; Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, and John Goodman are just wonderful practitioners, and even with the horrifying script they manage to make their characters fun to watch. The exception is George Clooney, who inevitably turns into an unbearable soap opera ham in the absence of a strong script and strong direction. The other pleasant aspect of the film is that you get to look at a bunch of really beautiful art. Yes, it’s not filmed very well, nor is it on screen for very long, and nothing interesting is said about it, but you get to experience just enough of it to keep you from walking out of the theater.

So, if your good friend absolutely wants you to accompany them to this film, it will be at worst mildly unpleasant and boring for you. But if possible, it’s best to skip this one altogether.

My wife and I caught the Oscar-nominated animated shorts at IFC this past weekend. I am not a big fan of animation, nor do I get to see a lot of short features (what person outside the film industry ever does?) but I must say I found these animated shorts to be great fun, most of them quite impressive in their artistic content. Your IFC ticket buys you the five nominated shorts plus three honorable mentions, all three of which I felt were better than two of the actual nominees.

My favorite out of the nominees was Monsieur Hublot, a very charming and interesting tale set in a futuristic landscape populated with beings who are constituted out of scrap wood and metal. Also wonderful was the Japanese short Possessions, which is an exploration of a old Japanese idea that personal articles like clothing and tools take on a (sometimes resentful) animated spirit presence. Feral, about a “wolf boy” who’s assimilated into human society, was visually amazing, but I found the story a bit abstract and theoretical, which diluted my enjoyment of it somewhat. The Disney feature, Get A Horse, was your typical, classical animated mayhem, and featured Micky and Minnie mouse, two animated characters I find distinctly uninteresting; though perhaps technically impressive, it lacked the substance of the others. The last nominated short, Room on the Broom, was a very cute story, but the animation seems well below all the others, including the honorable mentions. My impression is that it got nominated because it’s based on a big children’s book, and they got many big British character actors to do voice-overs, although the vocal-parts are so minimal you can hardly distinguish any of their voices (I think Gillian Anderson only says “yes” and “whooooo!” and maybe one other word, and Rob Brydon’s participation is limited to rather lame cat noises.)

The three honorable mentions made up for Room on the Broom, however. À La Française depicts an alternate-universe 19th century Versailles populated by a bunch of pompous, preening chickens all dressed up in French finery; it’s a lot of fun, and the kind of thing you could watch over and over again. The Missing Scarf is utterly bizarre, featuring a squirrel who goes around giving insufferable, new-agey philosophical advice to various psychologically troubled animals he meets in the forest, animals who then meet horrible, contrary fates the minute he leaves!! My wife and I both loved this one! The Blue Umbrella was remarkable for the way it animated everyday urban objects that are seldom animated, like drainpipes, manhole covers, walk-signs, and so on; the story was a bit saccharine, I guess, but who cares? I would probably have nominated these three runners up ahead of Get a Horse, Feral, and Room on the Broom.

Anyway, if you’re in NYC, you might want to catch these shorts for a change of pace; I’m sure they must be playing somewhere in LA as well. They are well worth a look, in my opinion.

I enjoyed The Invisible Woman, but I must say the film did not make much of an impression on me; in fact, my memory of it is something of a grey-brown blur. This true story about Charles Dickens’ secret mistress is certainly interesting enough on a superficial level, but the film feels overly-reserved, overly subtle, and that may be being kind. The film’s ideas are dealt with in a rather minimalist and perfunctory manner, dialog is utilitarian, character development is broad-brush, and in the end I really did not come away with an understanding of main character or her life. Ralph Fiennes is decently winning as Charles Dickens, and the always splendid Tom Hollander and Kristen Scott Thomas turn in nice supporting performances. But Felicity Jones is more of a mixed bag as an actress – sometimes she brings a really nice quality to the screen and sometimes it feels like she is just taking up space. I don’t blame her for the vagueness of her character, but she definitely did not find a way for her character to transcend the film’s writing.

If you really like period pieces, The Invisible Woman is pretty okay entertainment. That’s as far as I will go in endorsing this film.

The Square is a captivating documentary on the fate of the so-called “Arab Spring” within Egypt, focusing on the January 11 demonstrations in Tahrir Square, and their protracted aftermath. It follows events through the eyes and reactions of six main characters from a variety of backgrounds, all of whom are strongly involved in the revolution, and all of whom are highly intelligent, passionate, articulate, and extremely likable. The pacing and content of the film is very well-judged, and the various events are for the most part explained well. It contains a lot of great live footage from the protests. It’s a very pleasing film to watch, and a very interesting one.

Where I think The Square really succeeds is in showing the intense and significant sociopolitical bonding of average working people in Egypt – their conversations, their aspirations, their driving commitment to forcing change to happen – all of which made possible the uprising and the overthrow of the brutal, hated Mubarak (who was strongly backed by the United States for decades, and to the bitter end.) It’s valuable as a contrast to the sad political climate in America, where working people are ignorant, impotent and completely isolated from each other, their quality of life nose-diving and their rights disappearing as they furiously distract themselves with alcohol, drugs, Xbox, professional sports, and watching depictions of the super-rich on TV. For this reason alone, Americans should see The Square, just to experience what a politicized citizenry actually looks like and sounds like.

But The Square does has a few shortcomings that are worth mentioning. It makes the revolution look a bit like a middle-class party, obscuring the fact that it was very much an uprising of the downtrodden working class, an uprising which flowered only after years of courageous, violent struggle for workers rights within Egypt. Mubarak didn’t step down just because some folks showed up in Tahrir Square with signs, chanting slogans! There had been years of massive strikes and social upheaval, always brutally repressed. It was good old-fashioned class struggle which brought together so many diverse groups (including Catholics and Muslims setting aside their differences) to force change in Egypt. This does not come across in the film.

The protagonists of the documentary muse that the revolution made a critical error in abandoning Tahrir Square after Mubarak stepped down, which left the military of his still empowered regime free to crush the protesters. In actuality I think their mistake was far deeper: they were destroyed by not having constructed a political party that actually represented the working class, instead relying on “protest activism” to try to force the privileged layers of society to make changes counter to their own interests (always a dubious strategy). Actually, one of the protagonists briefly alludes to this in the film, complaining that there is no point in holding elections until there is someone to actually elect. And he was right, but of course they needed to be thinking about this years before, so they were ready to take control when their moment arrived.

When elections are called (partly to neutralize the dissenting population), The Muslim Brotherhood comes to power, and here again the documentary misses key elements of the story. In the eyes of the documentary’s main characters, The Muslim Brotherhood betrayed the revolution for their own nutty religious aims. This is very true, and they certainly are a bunch of religious whack-jobs. But it’s important to note that they are also a completely bourgeois political force: fully backing American imperial interests in the Middle East, immediately inviting in the IMF to further rape the Egyptian working class, and continuing the suppression of the revolutionaries.

The Muslim Brotherhood was able to “betray the revolution” and come into power because Washington allowed and encouraged this to happen. America does not have a problem with nutty Islamic regimes (we like Saudi Arabia just fine, for example). What we have a problem with is countries that want to take their destinies into their own hands, rather than follow our orders and submit to our economic depredations. Which brings us to the implicit and devastating message of The Square: It’s almost impossibly hard to change any society for the benefit of the poor working majority, because any society’s privileged sectors will be backed by the unassailable world-wide network of power and privilege. The obvious question is: where is the world-wide network of average working people? Of course this is a distinctly unsexy question in this day and age.

The Square is already out of date. After the Egyptian military took power back from the Muslim Brotherhood by a coup d’etat, they rammed through a new constitution (through an openly fraudulent, nationwide “ratification”) that basically establishes a permanent military dictatorship. Since this sham ratification, the military has stepped up the torture and murder of the dissenting population. And the United States, the “world’s policeman”, has absolutely no problem with any of this. The hopes and dreams of the lovely, passionate young people featured in the documentary resonate even more tragically with knowledge of what went on to happen.

I strongly encourage everyone to see The Square, and ponder the thrill, disappointment, and challenges of trying to make the world a better place.

My wife and I finally caught up to Nebraska, the last of the Best Picture Oscar nominations that I had not yet seen. It a simple little story about old age dementia, in which a son humors his age-addled father by driving him to Lincoln, Nebraska so he can “claim” a million dollar prize from a common magazine subscription scam he’s been fooled by. The dialog is realistic but sparse and a bit dull, and character development is minimal and unsatisfying. There are aspects of the film which I guess are somewhat sweet, but it’s mostly a depressing spectacle about how horrible it is to grow old in our society unless you have a lot of money. Even the lauded camera-work and cinematography are just okay. About the only thing I enjoyed in this film is Bruce Dern’s performance; I am now officially rooting for him to win the Best Actor Oscar (he won’t), just because I love the idea of such a completely unsexy character taking home the top prize! It really is a lovely performance by Dern, loaded with a nuanced tenderness that makes him the only character in the film that you actually like. Oh, and I also enjoyed seeing a very brief cameo by the ever-memorable “Cammi” (Missy Doty) from Sideways.

In certain circles, this film is being praised for its radical social content. I found this quite an exaggeration, bordering on wishful projection. Basically its social content is a broad-brush depiction of rural America as a bunch of impoverished, inebriated clowns who essentially do nothing but say stupid things to each other and waste time in various ways. Setting aside the fact that this is a distinctly unhelpful generalization, if we assume that it contains certain elements of the truth, the film still has absolutely nothing to say about how they got this way, why they are so paralyzed, why they drink so much, or how they really feel about their lives. Sure there’s a lot of poor, desperate people in America, but the impoverished state of these particular characters makes little impression because they are so buffoonish no viewer would ever want to associate themselves with them long enough to have a interesting thought about any provocative commonality; even the idea of the poor dreaming of magically becoming rich has no force because it is sublimated via the dementia storyline.

We were sitting in an audience of old people who were howling with laughter at all the contempt-filled sniping between the various elderly characters in the film, especially Dern and his wife, played by June Squibb. If this makes you think you might enjoy Nebraska, by all means go for it. Otherwise, I really don’t think there is enough here to warrant paying to see it in a theater.

Lone Survivor is inspired by a true story about four American SEALs who were ambushed during a 2005 reconnaissance mission in Afghanistan that was part of Operation Red Wings. Evaluated strictly as an action film, Lone Survivor is put together pretty effectively. The camerawork and choreography of the long, intense fighting scenes is done well and excitingly. The dialog, while minimal, is sufficient to give a fairly decent picture of the choices the SEALs faced throughout the operation, although much of the dialog is focused on showing what tough bastards they all are. Character development is minimal, but personalities do emerge to a certain extent. The story is depressing as hell, but one of the four guys does survive (Marcus Luttrell, whose recollections form the basis of the memoir which inspired the movie), and at the end the film honors his many fallen comrades with real pictures and video footage.

But even though Lone Survivor is a very literal, idealess film, focusing solely on the recreation of a sequence of physical events, it nevertheless projects on its audience a powerful set of fallacious sociopolitical ideas, ideas that are consumed without question amidst the story’s intensely one-sided emotions. In so doing, it tarnishes the memory of the brave soldiers who died, whose deaths are thus reduced to mere propaganda for our government’s military ambitions. Here’s interesting reading on the true story of Operation Red Wings, written by Ed Darak for the Marine Corps Gazette in 2011, detailing some of the distortions and exaggerations that made their way into Luttrell’s memoir, and discussing the importance of honesty in reporting military matters to the civilian population. Unfortunately, the movie further intensifies this pattern of distortion and exaggeration.

The target of the reconnaissance mission, Ahmad Shah, is presented in the film as a high-level Al Qaeda operative and a Taliban leader. In reality he was just a local guerrilla commander, with no ties to al Qaeda, and was not even Taliban. The film also lies that Shah had “killed twenty Marines” the week before Operation Red Wings (“and if we don’t do something about him he’ll kill 20 more next week”); official government casualty figures flatly deny this. The sad fact is these brave, talented soldiers did not die fighting terrorists and keeping America safe; they died for murky geopolitical reasons related to the U.S. desire to control and exploit the Middle East, and to prop up the puppet government we installed in Afghanistan after forcing the Taliban from power. This does not diminish the tragedy of their deaths, but shouldn’t we at least be honest about why they died, so we can make an informed assessment of the actual value of their sacrifice?

Furthermore, in the military’s official AAR (after action report) on Operation Red Wings, Luttrell stated they were ambushed by 20-35 men; in the memoir and the movie the attackers suddenly number more than a hundred, with the four SEALs killing at least 20-35, yet still losing the fight overwhelmingly. It’s not like this issue is all hearsay either: Shah filmed two videos of the ambush, and U.S. military analysis of these seems to confirm a very small band of attackers, maybe as small as 8-10. Plus, Luttrell was never seconds from having his head hacked off with a machete (the film strongly pushes this idea of barbarians cutting heads off), Shah never attacked the village that sheltered and gave medical aid to Luttrell (not surprisingly, because such an act would have eroded village support for insurgent groups), and Luttrell was never anywhere near flat-lining – in fact, according to the memoir they stopped to have tea with the locals during his recovery by the U.S. military.

All this may seem like harmless embellishment, but when mixed with the film’s direct implication that what got the soldiers killed was lack of functioning equipment, shortage of attack helicopters, and what Luttrell sees as the excessively humane U.S. military rules of engagement (the film strongly implies that if the SEALs had just murdered the three innocent goat-herders that accidentally compromised the mission they would have survived), the film’s overall message is that the few but super-human soldiers of the United States are over there fighting (hopelessly outnumbered and with one arm tied behind their backs) an overwhelming and demonic terrorist army of evil monsters intent on beheading every American on earth. This nonsense really does not need reinforcement in the American consciousness, especially since all that really happened in this story is a local guerrilla leader and his small, rag-tag force attacked the foreign army currently (and illegally) occupying their country.

It’s very sad that Lone Survivor decided to tell this story through a warped lens of paranoid jingoism, rather than simply telling the truth. I guess the truth is just too complicated and painful for Americans to deal with. So see Lone Survivor if you want, but it’s probably best to consume it as a work of pure fiction.

I finally caught up with the 2011 Danish film, In a Better World (Hævnen), a film I was interested in back when it was playing in New York theaters, but wound up avoiding out of fear it was a bleak, postmodern downer. It turned out to be neither bleak nor postmodern. It’s actually a fairly gripping and interesting little movie about violence and where we draw the line for resorting to it, its story revolving around a pair of children: Christian, who has just lost his mother and is messed up about it, and Elias, a sensitive child who is bullied at school and is struggling with his parents divorce. The lives of the boys and their respective families are changed forever by their newly-formed friendship, a friendship dominated by Christian’s dark psychological issues.

The Danish title of this film is Vengeance, and the message of the film seems to be that violence is sometimes a good thing, but when it is wielded cavalierly it can quickly spin out of control and lead to mayhem and despair. I’m not totally sure what I think of this philosophy, but having spent a few years of my boyhood being viscously bullied by the violent, demented, genetically compromised spawn of northern New England, I had a lot of sympathy when Christian saves Elias from a psychopathic tormenter by bashing the cretin’s head in with a tire iron! When told that violence just leads to more violence, Christian replies “not if you hit hard enough the first time,” and he is proved right in the film as neither of the boys is ever bothered again. But this initial act of violence cascades in a very interesting way to Elias’ father, a gentle, Doctors Without Boarders physician who faces various types of violence in his own life, both home and abroad in Africa, where he works. The new influence of Christian in his son’s life initiates in him an overt expression of moral code in which he starts walking the line between “good” violence and bad, with nerve-wracking consequences.

This is a well-written film which manages to develop effectively its ideas on violence while also painting an interesting and sensitive portrait of the two father-son relationships; the father-son themes are not super deep, but they are woven together with the main vengeance theme quite skillfully, giving the narrative a pleasing flow and texture. The dialog is solidly good, and character development is very nicely done, with even minor characters coming across surprisingly vividly. All the performances are really strong. And the film’s ending is extremely satisfying and delightfully broadminded.

I really didn’t expect anything half this good when I sat down to watch this film, and together with other recent, high-quality Danish films I’ve enjoyed – A Hijacking and Love is All You Need – it’s making me realize I need to pay more attention to what’s going on in the Danish film industry. I would definitely recommend In a Better World.

January is a really dull time at the movies, with theaters endlessly hanging on to all the (mostly shitty) Oscar hopefuls in pursuit of easy, guaranteed revenue streams. Even my favorite off-beat theater, Cinema Village, is doing this to a certain extent. But this week Cinema Village opened a new movie which will kick off the 2014 review year here at Irreviews, an obscure Anna Paquin film called Free Ride. At the 7:00 show there was only me and one other person in the theater, but a bag-person did walk-in half way through and camp out, so I guess you could say it drew a prime-time audience of three!

Free Ride is a bit of a throwback to the Indie Renaissance of the 90’s, and a very enjoyable one. It reminded me a bit of certain works by Victor Nunez, Coastlines and Ulee’s Gold, in its simple, unadorned narrative style and its themes of bleak working-class struggle in the American south, and the always present temptation of criminality, not as a means to get rich, but as a means to merely get by. Free Ride is a true story about a young, single mother of two (Anna Paquin) living in shit somewhere in Ohio and getting beaten up by her boyfriend on a regular basis, who moves her family to Florida and connects with a friend who’s sets her up working for a medium-size, regional drug kingpin. She starts to get her feet under her, but by the very nature of her employment solution it is of course doomed to be transitory.

This film was definitely made on a shoestring budget (one “hospital” scene was clearly shot in some motel,) but the elements of the film come together well enough that you don’t really care. The story is engaging and smartly paced, and all the performances (Paquin and her no-name supporting cast) are quite strong and very natural; the film was clearly well-directed. The dialog may be limited, but it’s well-crafted and efficient, and combined with good scene structuring the viewer connects with the various characters, even the minor ones, and is consistently immersed in the story. The score for the film was actually kind of remarkable: a hodgepodge of presumably modern songs (if they’re really from the 70’s, I’ve certainly never heard them) that half sounded like 70’s music and half sounded like the spaced-out scores one used to hear in 90’s indie films; that description sounds a bit horrid, I know, but whatever strange genera of music they were inventing, the songs are surprisingly pleasing, and fit the mood of the film excellently.

The other really striking thing about this film is its ending, which is a brief monologue from the real-life women who’s played by Anna Paquin in the film, explaining that in a society that does so little for struggling segments of the population, people are sometimes going to turn to crime simply out of love for their dependents (she didn’t say it quite that succinctly, but that was the general idea.) I don’t think I’ve ever seen this kind of thing in a movie, and while I’m not sure I loved the device, it was a bit gutsy and it certainly did not spoil my memory of the film.

Lastly, brava to Anna Paquin for getting involved in this little film, and not only lending her talent and star power to the lead role, but also producing the film as well. I really respect actors and actresses who have the guts to do interesting work, rather than merely chase fame, money and awards all the time.

Free Ride will almost certainly be gone from Cinema Village by Friday, so if you want to catch it, go tonight or tomorrow night. I would certainly recommend it, if you like old-school indie films.

On the surface, The Wolf of Wall Street is your typical outrageous Martin Scorsese picture, a much more extreme rehash of the basic story idea of Scorsese’s Goodfellas – criminals living the wild high life, until it all comes crashing down on them. All of Scorsese’s trademark themes are there: criminality, violence, drug abuse, and the objectification of women. It’s quite a spectacle, let me tell you, and consumed without reflection it’s very entertaining, and rather funny, in a sick kind of way. Leonardo DiCaprio gives a classic, showy “Scorsese lead performance”, probably one of the better ones I can think of. The sold out theater of wage-slave hipsters in the Union Square 14 certainly found it very, very amusing. If you like this kind of thing, I doubt The Wolf of Wall Street will disappoint you.

But I think The Wolf of Wall Street deserves a more careful consideration than to merely praise Scorsese for again producing the kind of film which he has proven over and over he can make well. Unlike Goodfellas which glorified the Mafia, an organization so remote to most Americans that it might as well exist on another planet altogether, The Wolf of Wall Street deals with the financial industry and its culture of greed, which is hugely impacting people’s lives, and to which any American can aspire to one day be a part of. It is fair to wonder: Is Scorsese doing anything more than exploiting this subject for the mere titillation and avaricious excitement of his audience?

There is in this film an extreme indulgence in voyeuristic admiration that is disconcerting, even angering. The minute details of Jordon Belfort’s life of obscene privilege and debauchery completely dominate the film, and are endlessly lurid: the Ferraris, the gigantic mansions, the 200 foot yachts complete with helicopter, and especially the ridiculously extreme and glamorized drug abuse, and a depiction of female subjugation more excessive than any I’ve ever seen: the ultra-rich are apparently surrounded by armies of brainless fucking machines, bred only to suck men’s dicks and get fucked like ragdolls in wild, enormous group orgies. Incredibly, this alluring spectacle is not counterbalanced by anything. The FBI agent, played by grim-visaged Kyle Chandler, is a cardboard figure who’s only developed insofar as to emphasize that he is a colorless bore who is too mentally and motivationally inferior to ever be anything more than a glorified flunky. Belfort’s first wife (who he replaces with the super-hot Margot Robbie) is an ugly hag who’s dragging him down. His dad is a working-class dip-shit who quickly falls in line with his cause once the money starts pouring in. And Belfort’s eventual arrest and convictions on various white-color charges is treated as worse than a joke; it’s treated almost as a miscarriage of democratic government.

Jordon Belfort himself is portrayed in the film as a remarkable man with a few character flaws -a smart, funny, handsome everyman who’s simply pursuing the “American dream,” and enjoying it once he gets there. The poor people he defrauds are laughable, ignorant morons who deserve to lose their money; the rich people he defrauds are respected equals (read: criminals) in what is very clearly the only game in town: the insatiable amassing of obscene wealth. The ghastly shallowness of Belfort’s worldview is consistently obscured, buried under a benighted celebration of his talents and distinctly American fighting spirit. Even at the very end of the film, after Belfort has been convicted, served his time, and finally arrived at his right and natural place in the world among big-money self-help frauds, we are confronted with him leading a Tony Robbins-like seminar scene which is carefully crafted as an invitation to sneer contemptuously at the audience of average people in attendance, who only want to learn how to achieve Jordan Belfort’s prior life.

Now, it’s all fine to say that Scorsese’s film is some kind of bold satire, and his intention is to rub our faces in the undiluted bile of Jordon Belfort’s mind in order to arouse our indignation. But if this is the case, I think he failed miserably. Costa Gavras’ masterpiece Capital (2012) is an example of a bold and successful satire of the financial industry, one which leaves the viewer with an incredible array of constructive thoughts and emotions about the deplorable condition of our society and its current values. In contrast, the main thing I took away from The Wolf of Wall Street is the question “where did I go wrong that I’m not snorting cocaine off a $20,000 hooker’s ass every night?” This film embraces the tragedy of American democracy like few films I’ve ever seen. Our society now completely justifies itself by the existence of a tiny group of elites blessed with almost limitless power, privilege and security; the “American dream” is in turn reduced to the feckless delusion that we average people might one day join the debauched elite ranks and start shitting on everybody else. In light of the peril the world finds itself in as a result of these perverted values, it strikes me as deeply irresponsible for Scorsese to make a film that offers up Jordan Belfort as a paragon of the American spirit, and reducing industriousness and creativity to the mere separation of “winners” from “losers” in a monstrously cruel, dog-eat-dog world. Unless the final shot of the triumphant FBI agent – glumly riding home on the filthy subway, looking at all the ugly, down-trodden, penniless working stiffs he’s commuting with – is supposed to reassure us that Jordan Belfort’s life wasn’t all that great.

I think the debunking of Scorsese’s supposed intentions boils down to one attribute of his film: the snappy narration. Without this constant stream of funny, winning lines from Leonardo DiCaprio, humorously excusing the endless deluge of criminality, narcissistic aggrandizement, exploitative misogyny, and stupefying bacchanalia, this film would be so sickening it would be completely unwatchable. Without the narration, you might have had the mental space to actually care a little bit about all the people Belfort is defrauding and robbing, to realize it’s actually pathetic that Belfort and his associates can only have fun by getting fucked up on quaaludes every night, to feel sad that the women in Jordon Belfort’s world allow themselves to be so publicly debased, and to lament the financialization of the world economy which has been rotting human society for forty years.

And you might even find yourself pondering the fact that Jordon Belfort is the kind of smart, working-class guy who 75 years ago would have proudly belonged to a union, fought for workers rights, and maybe even attended meetings of socialist, Marxist or Anarcho-Syndicalist organizations. And you might begin wondering to yourself why there is currently nothing in this society beyond greed and excess for a talented and persuasive guy like Jordan Belfort to value and aspire to.

See The Wolf of Wall Street if you must, and if you have the stomach for it. But remember: there really are better things to do with your life besides snorting cocaine out of some woman’s ass-crack.