Much has been made of the Scorsese-esque elements of David
O. Russell’s necessarily-oscar-snubbed (via 12 Years a Slave/Gravity) American
Hustle—pop songs integrated both diagetically and non, convoluted morality, a
certain quirky, slightly off tone—and
undeniably the comparison is apt; it even has a De Niro cameo! But Martin
Scorsese also put out a movie last year, and The Wolf of Wall Street is
something of a manic masterpiece, capturing perfectly the man’s own giddy
fascination with its repugnant-yet-charismatic protagonist. It is the youngest movie I’ve seen him make in at
least a decade, lean and surprising and vicious for every moment of its three
hours.
Where The Wolf of Wall Street breezes through 180 minutes,
however, American Hustle feels every minute of its 138. This is not a criticism
per se, but an assertion: though these two films treat similar themes—selfish
amorality, image obsession, audacious hucksterism and The American Dream—and
employ period settings, they are tonally mirror images of one another, the
worlds established in each polar opposites. David O. Russell’s film asserts
that at their core people basically want to be with the people they love and
that their machinations and pretences are more coping mechanisms for wounded
psyches than ends in themselves. Scorsese on the other hand is just along for
the ride, lauding with hallucinatory, mythological glory the unexamined, unchallenged
persona of Jordan Belfort; it is as though he is saying “look, audience, here
is one of those rarer monsters of our history, a being of pure id and appetite.
Observe him in his natural habitat with no further comment.” That is, where the
former is a nervous, sideways affirmation of humanity, the latter is a paean to
excess in all things: an antihero’s journey.
The first thing a film shows you is always important.
American Hustle begins with several minutes of Christian Bale futzing with his
elaborate hairstyle, a thatched mountain of toupee and hairspray, only for
Bradley ‘Frightwig’ Cooper to immediately bluster into the room and muss it up,
Bale accusing Amy Adams of dressing Cooper like him in the ensuing argument,
intimating that she’s replacing one with the other. In an instant, then, one
perceives what this movie is about: the intricate façades of life, the layered duplicities
of ‘a life of crime,’ and the fragility of both.
Whereas, of course, Wolf of Wall Street opens with a blowjob
in a magical Ferrari. No, really. The first scene, pre-credits even, is Jordan
Belfort (it bears noting that the performance is such that it never occurred to
me to refer to him as DiCaprio, as with Bale and co.) telling the film itself
that his car “wasn’t red; it was white, like Don Johnson’s in Miami Vice” while receiving fellatio from his “Duchess”
wife. Again, the title he bestows upon his first-adulterous-girlfriend-then-second-wife
is the film: an honor bestowed on a
whim, maintained for its implication as much as affectation and affection, even
as Belfort himself assumes only the title of Wolf. More on that later. The Ferrari, as well as reality, obliges
Belfort, and the color changes. This is not a man who compromises his vision,
one could infer.
This surreal wish-fulfillment echoes both the intentionally
obscene displays of wealth Belfort favors—reality-distorting in their own way,
as in the private plane he charters to rescue him from his doomed yacht, which
is struck by lightning and explodes on approach nearly-unnoted in the
background of one particularly hallucinatory sequence—and the potent narcotics
he literally constantly consumes. A major laugh line, as well as perhaps the
credo of the film, is Belfort, ordering Jonah Hill to go get the Quaaludes from
the cabin of said sinking yacht, proclaiming “I will not die sober!” Beyond the rightly-gushed-over Lemmon 714 scene,
reality distorts severely at key moments throughout Belfort’s story, often in
conjunction with totemic snippets of Smokestack Lightning—Howlin’ Wolf, should
the joke be lost—that act as a filmic version of the chest-pounding bestial
hype-up chant Matthew McConaughey bequeaths the film and hero, denoting beyond
all doubt that this is the shit, man! Personally, I found the
key scene in establishing the association between beastliness and financial
success and heavy drug use to be the one in which, having just quit his job on
the strength of Belfort’s last paycheck, Jonah Hill smokes crack with him. Upon
Jordan’s first puff, he exhales and screams that they must both immediately “run, like Lions and Tigers
and Bears!” The which they both do, right out the restaurant and into the
street.
It is Martin Scorsese at his absolute best, depicting these
lunatic Capitalist cavemen, and we the audience are helpless but to share in
his awe of the spectacle he has created. Indeed, in the thematically-key way
Scorsese cameos always are, he appears as a voice on the phone, to whom Belfort
sells thousands of dollars of worthless penny stocks while relentlessly and
overwhelmingly stroking his ego. He throws money down the toilet to feed
Jordan’s arrogance and rejuvenate his career, then happily says he’s “gonna go
have a beer” to celebrate his surefire investment. We are Martin; we have been taken by Belfort, and are waiting only
to see for how much.
But if Wolf the film is Belfort the character—grandiose,
inebriated, seemingly-invincible—then American Hustle is Christian Bale’s Irv Rosenfeld: inherently cautious and
conservative, with a sentimental streak even in his scams and a genuine desire
to be decent and normal and loved. The glimpse we get of his childhood presents
a strongly Goodfellas-esque image of a boy with a good heart and questionable
ethics breaking neighborhood windows to help his father’s glass business, and
his initial scams—selling fake art as real and offering fake loans as genuine—are
clearly almost as satisfying for the moment in which the mark is genuinely
overjoyed at his seeming luck as for the sheer take of it. Love and subtle
deceit are intertwined for Irv, as he woos Amy Adams—and she assumes a British
accent and false aristocracy to become his partner in crime as well as
love—even as he remains married to a deeply unbalanced and unhinged Jennifer
Lawrence and devoted to her young son.
The very madness that sustains The Wolf of Wall Street is
presented as dangerous and destabilizing in American Hustle; overweening
ambition and drug-addled intensity as monstrous and frightening, rather than
the highest possible good. Bradley Cooper, for all the humanizing scenes of him
with his curlers in at his mom’s apartment, ultimately falls prey to his own
id, alienating Amy Adams from him forever with coked-up sexual aggression and
ruining both his career and his own wildly-expanding plans for the case at hand
by losing control of his emotions and aspirations. Likewise, Jennifer Lawrence
is the only character in Hustle who could step into Wolf unaltered and seem at
home, bristling with selfish, blind self-importance and greed in all things,
holding onto Irv just because she can,
because she has power over his feelings and therefore him. Rosenfeld is
crippled, in her eyes, by his love, both for Adams and for his adopted son; the
boy is just another weapon she can use to keep him. She is the ugly reminder
that he has obligations beyond his desires, the truth that cannot be pushed
aside for convenience’s sake. To borrow her own metaphor for herself, she is
“that bit of rot in the sweetness that keeps you coming back.”
Genuine human connection and love are at the center of
American Hustle’s worldview, and they are presented as redemptive of all
things: they can transmute lies to truth, even as they break one’s heart.
Falsehood is necessary only as a tool; it is one’s love that drives one’s life. Case in point, Jeremy Renner’s Mayor
Carmine Polito, who enters the film as just another mark, but with whom Irv
forges a true friendship, such that when the time comes to bring the hammer
down, Rosenfeld cannot help but try to save him from the law, even at the cost
of his based-in-falsehood relationship with the man. There is perhaps no symbol
more densely loaded with meaning in the film than the microwave—or “science
oven,” as it is consistently called—Polito gives Irv as a thank-you for being a
good friend, which Jennifer Lawrence promptly destroys by putting tinfoil in it
in a drunken, nihilistic stupor. Indeed, even the Mexican-American FBI agent
who steps in to play “the sheik” for the principles’ meeting with De Niro’s mob
boss is rescued by—for lack of a less-clichéd phrase—the power of friendship,
suddenly remembering his few Arabic phrases just in time to avoid blowing their
cover. Though this is of course not directly suggested, the symbolic
implication is that his friendship with Bradley Cooper has ‘turned him into a
real boy,’ so to speak.
It would stand to reason, then, that if love conquers all
and earnest humanity can redeem anyone in American Hustle, then they must be
pure weakness and self-destruction in Wolf of Wall Street. Belfort cannot
distinguish between forms of affection, convincing himself that his Duchess’
aunt—brilliantly portrayed by Joanna Lumley—is coming onto him by being
friendly and helpful, then proceeding to exploit his new relative by using her
to launder money through Switzerland. Shoe designer Steve Madden, who is
presented as a childhood friend of Jonah Hill’s character, comes across as
ludicrous and pathetic in his grand address to Belfort’s firm, saved only by
Jordan’s trademark grandiose rhetoric. Making something real is absurd and
laughable, the film asserts: only artful deception is praiseworthy and
powerful.
Likewise, the Wolf is ultimately undone by his handful of
true friendships: first when he refuses to seize the one safe way out of his
wildly-illegal activities and resign before prosecutions begin because he feels
a tribal connection to his employees, and ultimately and entirely when he
cannot bring himself to incriminate Jonah Hill. The note he scribbles to warn
his best, oldest friend is presented to him as evidence upon his arrest; there
is no love on Wall Street. Nor off it: just as Belfort’s one true friendship is
his downfall, his one inescapable human relationship is the one crack in the
façade he uses the film to portray. During what turns out to be the last of
many crazy arguments between the Wolf and his Duchess, we stay with our
protagonist documentarily as he punches his wife full on in the stomach, then
proceeds to give his young daughter whiplash by crashing his car into a wall
while trying to kidnap her. Without shifting tone one iota, Scorsese has
delivered an emotional hammer blow, as if to remind his audience that for all
his Napoleonic drive and devilish charisma, this
is not a nice man.
The ‘ever afters’ at the end of each film, as one might well
assume, encapsulate the philosophy of each most cogently of all. Consistently
throughout American Hustle Irv Rosenfeld repeats his credo: “have another
move.” That is, know what you’re going to do when you have to get out of the
hustle, because otherwise it will eventually bring you down with it. And he
does: our last image of him is as the loving father and husband he always
wanted to be, raising Jennifer Lawrence’s son with Amy Adams as his now-ex
follows her manic bliss. He made his next move, and it was to turn legit, at
long last.
Jordan Belfort, on the other hand, watches his world crumble
around him and feels that icy fear for one brief moment, then remembers that
he’s rich, and that nothing really bad ever happens to rich people in America. He serves his time at a
correctional resort, then gets right back to bilking suckers to feed his
immortal, omnipotent ego; the man himself even appears in the final scene to
drive his smirking invulnerability home, giving DiCaprio’s version of him an
appropriately overblown and self-congratulatory introduction at a motivational
seminar. Which image one considers ‘The American Dream’ depends wholly on what
one thinks of ‘America’ as a philosophy: are we a nation of moral hustlers who
just want to be loved, or of sociopathic superhumans who bend reality to our
whim?
