Time is a flat circle, and Dr. Manhattan repeats that it is 2023 and Martin Scorsese is dismissing superhero films and Twitter is full of passionate defending the MCU and attacking Scorsese or defending Scorsese and attacking the MCU.
Nothing ever changes. It's still Twitter, not even X.
Here's the thing I don't get though: since when is Martin fucking Scorsese the aesthete who looks down on genre films?
The man's career is built on mob violence, cocaine, and naked prostitutes. That's what his movies are, at least weighted by how much money they made. Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, the Irishman. Three hours of "a working class man is seduced by a world of crime, claws his way up with ambition and bravo, lives a very high life, gets hubris, comes crashing down with federal investigations." Some variations, but that's the basic arc over and over.
I'm not saying they are bad. The set pieces are entertaining, if repetitive. And he is superlative at filming these. But if you're judging movies just by what genre they are in, comic books are comic books and superheroes aren't much more populist than mafia.
(Sure, Last Temptation is something else but that's half a century ago. Silence is something else but no one even watched that. You're all still talking about Wolf of Wall Street and he won the Oscar for Departed.)
***
So I decided to actually watch Wolf of Wall Street for the first time. (I could say between the DCEU and Scorsese, only one of them has asked Margot Robbie to pose naked, but that's unfair, because she's really one of the more human parts of Wolf.)
It's... not good?
I mean the writing. The cinematography is great, especially for the big set pieces that zoom through a crowded trading floor, or he lingers the camera for far too long to catch the humor and surrealism of being high as fuck.
But the film is like 50% by runtime, dudes doing cocaine and hookers at obscene parties. DiCaprio's arc is "hustles his way up, really loves money and drugs, gets arrogant, gets pursued by the feds, crashes." It's the same damn arc as always, and no, I do not think "what if a stockbroker really liked being rich but was betrayed by his wife who was sick of his crimes" captures the nuances of the human spirit.
Jonah Hill and Jon Bernathal are really funny at least. But it's funny, not touching or revealing.
(I betray myself by pointing out that DiCaprio's real undoing is not desire for money, but twice his genuine love for Stratton-Oakmont. But do I think that is what the director was really trying to investigate?)
The silliest nit to pick is that Wolf... doesn't even say anything about the world of money. Sure it's accurate about the boiler rooms of high pressure sales people trying to push bad stocks onto dumb money, but that's a very tiny slice of financial activity. Even the few times Leo is about to explain an IPO, he lampshades it by saying we don't care about that stuff and just saying "we're gonna make a lot of money!" Everything is a zero-sum game and there's nothing but predatory instinct. This is the world of the Social and Symbolic, and the Real is non-existent.
Quick, who's your favorite female Scorsese character that isn't a victimized housewife turned into plaster saint? I'm sure you thought of one eventually, but it took a bit didn't it?
***
To compare it, I just watched Margin Call, the fictionalized account of a nameless i-bank over 24 hours starting the 2008 crash. It's very theatre-like or writerly, usually two talking head chewing scenery at each other, and half the scenes look like they were shot for television (especially any in an elevator or at a bar.)
But the writing is a better story, by orders of magnitude. Yes, there are the sharks to whom all of finance is a social game to move blame onto the other guy before you catch it. But they actually have to deal with the Real sometimes, like when someone's model shows all of their mortgage backed securities are about to crash and take their overly-leveraged company with them. You see the canniest minds pivoting from the world of taking credit (and shifting blame) to responding to the world changing under their feet... and then back into the social games the second they've found their footing.
You see a man lay off 80% of his floor one morning, care less about them than his dog's tumor, and yet later sincerely grapple with the moral code of being a salesman, telling his billionaire boss to fuck off on a matter of principle. You see Paul Bettany explain how easy it is for people who earn seven figures a year to spend it all without realizing, and so be unable to give up their job no matter awful it gets.
(You may be appalled at them, but have you ever considered explaining where all your income goes to a family that earns 1/10th what you do?)
... the feminine representation isn't much better, to be fair. Demi Moore's executive is social conniver left holding the back, and that's all we get of women besides a brief snippet from Mary McDonnell. But the movie ain't perfect. It still has a lot less nipples than Wolf.
It's very weird to see Tumblr arguing about sex scenes in movies, as if every boob we've seen on screen was from an intimate coming together of emotional catharsis. And not just a fourth chance to say "look at how many hookers DiCaprio's character hired for company events." We get it, and this is the high priest of cinema? Like yeah, maybe we can have a few less of those scenes.
