FAMILY GUYS OF WALL STREET....

Rainy Friday night and I went by myself.    Cinema full of city, mainly men, possibly some seeing it for the second time I'm not sure. Many of them knew the words.

Beautifully shot film reminding me of the jagged edits of Goodfellas.   De Caprio brilliant as the protaganist but Matthew McCon (whatever his name is) was excellent.   He's not in it long but he is stronger in this than Leo.  Very funny line about wanking.

Scorsese shoots the scenes, sometimes the characters talking to us (the audience, the watcher, the punter) direct and sometimes interacting so we feel complicit in the duplicity, and not one of the patsies they are mocking for wanting to be rich and lacking the intelligence to know that they are speaking to men who know how to screw the system as well as they do the punters.   We become one of 'them' - although we're not. Although I felt in the cinema there were quite a few of 'them' there, although they hadn't made that amount of money because they would be living the life on the screen and not in a cinema in Richmond on a Friday night.

The brokers are shown to be either rich boys wanting to get richer or salesman who can be taught to sell anything to script. They don't start off bad, the system just makes them that way.   That's how it's sold to the audience anyway.  (although my son returned from his father telling me young men are wanting to be traders now having seen the film which tends to suggest otherwise, or alternatively his father is talking out his backside). Both are possible.

The director doesn't show the lives these men (and women) destroyed (suicides, businesses going under, homes lost, livelihoods lost on a global scale), we know the tip of the iceberg already of that. He shows what they do/did with the money although I sense this is also the tip of the iceberg.  At one point a character mentions the amount of money these guys are earning is obscene but I'm not sure anyone is quite aware of how obscene. I'm not even sure Scorsese is.   Even he couldn't find a big enough yacht to symbolize that.  There is only so many hookers you can get on a plane - although he did manage to get an awful lot on one of them in the film  (I watched Snakes on a Plane the night before for the first time and see similarities in choreography with some of the activities).  And there is only so much coke you can stick up your nose, and pills you can pop, but it was an education which the rest of the audience in the cinema already seemed to know a lot about. Or wanted others to think they knew a lot about.  

And Joanna Lumley's in it playing a posh English aunt.   Yup.

There were other similarities to Goodfellas.   The frenzied anger and pumped up hatred on the faces of the brokers is animalistic and visceral, reminding me of the contorted psychosis of the gangster Joe Pesci played, the mad, bad, dangerous to know gangster in Goodfellas.   He at least got his head blown off as did a lot of the others.  These crooks get away with a jail sentence. Got away with it. Are getting away with it.  They get blown a lot but not blown away, unfortunately.  The palpable, persistent and absolute contempt the brokers have for everyone around them is well observed.  It's real, as in it's real, present, current, in the now.  The broker comraderie shallow and short lived. You get a sense they could tear the skin off the bones of their colleagues with their teeth to get the deal.   It is such a pity they don't actually do it in the film or in real life for that matter.   There's no evidence of that over whelming sense of self entitlement evident when you meet a city trader in real life and at one point Di Caprio says to camera 'we don't create anything, we don't make anything, we don't build anything.'  And the markets they did create screwed up the world.

The audience laughed at the jokes about the stages of drug induced coma, as though they identified.

Two scenes from the film cut the air in the cinema dead.  The last time I had been in a cinema when the atmosphere was so tense was in the film The Innocent Man when there was a scene where a white man was being raped by a black man.   In this film, it was the scene where De Caprio was with the girlfriend and the wife opened the car door to find him sniffing coke off the girlfriend's chest.  Cut to stag party with hookers on the plane and wedding in the Bahamas.  One out one in.  The audience had been there, the divorce, and probably the Bahamas as well.

And the next when the aforementioned girlfriend (now wife and mother of his children) threatened to take the children, and he screamed incandescent rage at her, punching her in the face.   I get an eery sense they identified with those scenes as well.  Loss of family still bites no matter how high the hookers and coke take you.   For a few weeks anyway.

There are a lot of lines in the film (not just of coke) that are sound bites to last at least a few months.    "I forgot for a time I was rich," De Caprio says at the end of the film, having been put in jail for a few years and coming out - at the other end of the world (in New Zealand) selling selling to another group of patsies, punters. Not sure if this was symbolically meant to represent he 'came out the other side the same' or the guy on which this was based genuinely did work in NZ.  

And moral to the tale?   Crime pays.   It pays extremely well.    And they got away with it and are still getting away with it and laughing at us as we look on.... at least the Goodfellas gangsters had some semblance of honour and respect for family, their family, "The' family. This lot don't even have that.