Wolf of Wall Street is American Hustle’s Evil Twin

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?