What we allow

Rating: Null/10 (11 January 2014)

Okay, let's try from the start to escape the whole debate raging about this and find our way back to the crux of the thing. This should be a way of life, swim through swathes of unnecessary noise so we can gleam the fact that cuts through and illuminates.
We have not figured life and death after all, it shouldn't be so easy to say anything about this man one way or the other. To show this, we need to find a human moment in the film, pluck it from the fabric and pose to ourselves the question. For me it's this: at one point the protagonist, a Wall Street scam artist, has been invited up to the apartment of a sexy blonde and contemplates sleeping with her or going back to his wife and rich, comfortable life, when she steps out naked. No one has to know, it is there for the taking. What do you do?
This is the whole thing right there. What if you could pick up a phone and make boatloads of money as easily as he could sleep with that girl, and you never have to know, no one has to know, where they have been torn form? That's not to say there can be no answer, we just can't pretend it's an easy one that one way or the other wouldn't keep us up at night.
The film is this sale made to us. It has to be convincing, every sale does. It has to lure us with the appeal, all that partying. We see that it's easy when you don't have to know, when the knowing is at an abstract distance, but the good life can be enjoyed today. We would like it to be this way perhaps. The film ends with the man making this sale to an audience eager to learn the trick.
It falls on us to see that it's a scam. This is not because eventually he pays dearly for it with all he had, because even in the end he has it pretty easy. The real Belfort spent an obscenely lenient 22 months in prison and is out now giving pep talks on strategy. This shows that we have built a system as fundamentally ignorant as the man himself: common burglary without prior record gets you 2-4 years for stealing pennies to Belfort's dollars, because in Belfort's case it is a subtler manipulation at that abstract distance.
It's a scam because it trades all that ferocious spending of time and energy and gives no real happiness back, and it can only be deeply apparent as such when we have to swim to that realization against the current of self who is entertained by the partying.
No mistake, Scorsese gambled here more than say, Goodfellas.
He lost, because the choice of topic demands most of the artistry goes on this side of the telephone and the overkill of meaningless partying sticks much more than the glimpse of his daughter's face as she watches him stoned out of his mind. It is all of course adapted from a book by Belfort himself on that life, the unreliability is signaled early with the car switching colors to the narrator's whim.
There's one masterful moment I will carry with me though, because it casts light on a more ambiguous human nature, and this is the crux of the thing. How can I become the person that will make me and others happy? Money isn't the answer of course, we see that it merely substitutes the anxiety of not having with a different set. But it cannot have anything to do with simply sticking to principle either, any more than expounding on gravity can make you a good skier.
The moment is when Belfort and his friend are both stoned in his place to near incapacity, his friend is choking to death and a Popeye cartoon is playing on TV. It's all there so clearly, cutting through right and wrong. What happens there? An image that pops up and surrounds that incapacitated self, drawing him out of his stupor to do something for someone else. It couldn't work if the urge wasn't there, and if the image did not inspire that self to become a person worthy of the story. This is not poetry but how the mind works, we are the thoughts we allow. This is to see the desire for the girl or money palpably rise in front of us, instead of at a distance. Still no easy answer, but now we're on to something.