It is not uncommon for Martin Scorsese to run his films around the three-hour mark. But strangely, his most recent film, Wolf of Wall Street (starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, and Margot Robbie), felt much longer. It’s not that the film lacked action, intensity, or any other essential Hollywood ingredient—violence, sex, drugs, etc. To the contrary, one can easily accuse this film of being overgenerous with this kind of material, even superfluous.
Although the excessive hedonism may have made the film too vulgar and difficult for some people to watch, I don’t think any of it was accidental. Rather, it is Scorsese’s clever way of driving home his main point, that is, that capitalism is a rotten system which bears no fruit, only banality and sickness. If we felt oversaturated, dazed, and disgusted while watching the film, it is because we were meant to.
If Scorsese merely wanted to entertain us, he would have fed us a more balanced diet: just enough drug scenes to make the characters amusing, a regulated amount of sex scenes to trigger slight arousal, and a calculated amount of violence to stir our excitement. This surely would have made the 180 minutes go by a bit faster, and maybe even make the life of a corporatist pimp somewhat appealing.
But Scorsese leaves no room for sympathy. He does not even bother touching on the ‘good’ side of capitalism, the ‘virtues’ of industry and business, what has been called the “Protestant Ethic.” Scorsese only focuses on capitalism's destructive nature, as he depicts how it destroys everything in sight: relationships, careers, families, even God.
In my view, one of the most telling scenes of the film was the scene in which DiCaprio’s character, Jordan Belfort, gives his wife Naomi (Margot Robbie) a new yacht as an anniversary present. By this point in the film, I was already numbed by all the untempered consumerism, and I expected Naomi to feel the same. She was already so rich; she had everything she could ever want. So what could possibly still stimulate her interest? But Naomi proved me wrong in my prediction. Tears of joy moistened her cheeks as Jordan revealed the new yacht. She was ecstatic. She fetishized her new commodity so devoutly that her tears became a quasi-mystical experience.
Mysticism, as I understand it, is a glimpse into a spiritual world outside of space and time, and beyond our imagination, for which the only possible human response is weeping or, if one is talented enough, poetry. Not unexpectedly, Naomi only settled for some liquid in her eyes, she was apparently a bit short on poetic wit.
For Naomi, the yacht was a vision of a god who had revealed himself to mankind as a hunk of metal floating on salt water—or better put, capital. But unfortunately for her and all the other main characters, their newly discovered god was cold and heartless at best, and hostile and utterly destructive at worst.