Animal House

Rating: 6/10 (28 March 2014)

There has been a lot of argument among critics as to whether Scorsese endorses or condemns the wretched excess portrayed in this movie. It depends, I think, on the viewer's own values.
More than anything else, the movie reminded me of the Samuel Johnson quote that Hunter Thompson used as the epigraph to Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas: "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man." Belfort and his crew are a certain kind of American man, and their beastliness is an effort to assuage the pain of being where they are on the social scale.
From watching Nancy Meyers movies, I've learned that how they consume is evidence of rich people's inner state. Money multiplies choices, and enough gives you the chance to do whatever you want. So the question becomes – what do you want? For Jordan Belfort and the (mostly) guys he recruits, the answer is life as a permanent beer commercial. All they can think of to do with the money is to buy sex, to buy drugs, and to buy stuff that shows everyone else you can afford to buy it. If you're a 23 year old lower middle class young man, as Belfort was at the beginning of the movie, the prospect may well be irresistible. For someone else, maybe not so much. I found their behavior to be grotesquely funny and Belfort, his crew and his trophy wife to be objects of disdain – the cast of Jersey Shore on steroids, who have no idea what to do with what they have, and who cannot communicate without bluster and obscenity.
These are people who obscurely sense that they are looked down on by their betters, who are enraged by that fact, and who gleefully act out their rage by theft and by flash consumption. There's one scene that makes the rage clear. Belfort invites the FBI agent pursuing him down to his yacht at the World Financial Center marina. First he offers food, then drink, then financial assistance. When the FBI man quietly calls him on it, Belfort drops his cool Master of the Universe act, tells the FBI to get the f* off his boat, and ends by tossing $100 bills at him to show how rich he is. Belfort can feel the agent looking at him like pond scum, and he can't stand it.
We see almost nothing of how Belfort and crew make the money. Speaking through the fourth wall, Belfort, which is to say Scorsese, repeatedly tells the audience that we don't care about how it's done, or what it means, and only want to see how it gets spent. What we are shown is the con man's contempt for the mark as someone just as greedy as he is but much, much stupider. As far as Belfort is concerned, the guy on the other end of the phone deserves to be swindled because he thinks of the stock market as a magic genie that will make him rich without effort or understanding, and because he is too stupid to know what he doesn't know.
Belfort is more disconcerting than Henry Hill or Frank Costello because he's a lot closer to us. These other Scorsese protagonists are blue collar thugs who make their money through physical violence. Belfort starts out middle class, and he makes his money through a fraudulent variant on what is otherwise legitimate activity. It's a lot easier to imagine ourselves, or our kids, doing what he does, which makes the respectable upper middle class viewer uneasy.
He's also more disconcerting than Irving Rosenfeld because he doesn't know his place. Rosenfeld believes in the small time con as both safe and sufficient. Belfort wants to be somebody. He's moving up the financial food chain from pump and dump to underwriting IPOs, and he wants his Long Island boiler room with the fake WASP name to be recognized as a real member of the club. He's also desperate for adulation – he walks away from a deal with the SEC because he can't stand a future without the adoration of his crew. But he never learns how to wear the mask of respectability, as Madoff did. He deliberately refuses to learn because he thinks enough money will force the establishment to accept him on his own terms, without needing the veneer of respectable manners. He is white trash rich and proud of his trashiness.