Scorsese through Wolf of Wall Street

This story dates back a couple of years, when I, in my newfound love for motion pictures, had dedicated my nights to sweeping off entire filmographies of master filmmakers from torrent sites. I’d download the torrent best fulfilling my file size-to-picture quality ratio (I preferred- and still do – a DVD quality rip of about 700MBs), mount the file on uTorrent (or Azureus, whichever’s latest version my tech-savvier brother approved of) and put the screen to the lowest brightness setting and drift to sleep. The 256 kbps speed ensured that the download took time till dawn to conclude, which was when my biological clock would wake me up and I would confirm the download, only to go back to an enhanced state of slumber, reassured by the knowledge of a successful download and put to rest by the anticipation of spending the following night watching another masterpiece.

Those were the days.

During one such movie-watching spree, after having been amazed and intrigued by Nolan’s pre-Dark Knight wonders and charmed by Tarantino’s inimitably colourful universe, I discovered the cinema of Martin Scorsese. I had heard his name being toted on this little community of online cinephiles on Orkut, which we had chosen to call ‘Movie Doctors’ (it was something to do with ‘dissecting’ films. Also, one of us was an actual doctor). There was word that his films had come to shape modern cinema as it was; his much-touted Taxi Driver and Raging Bull seemed to be on the lips of every fact-spouting, trivia-memorized film enthusiast. Roger Ebert, too, one of the most venerated figures in film criticism (he passed away last year; condolences), hailed ‘Marty’ as the ‘greatest living film director’, which really was something.

I was thrilled; I just had to see his films and gain exclusive entry into the ‘it’ crowd. I remember feeling envious of people possessing more knowledge and boasting viewership of more films than me. At the first opportunity, I wanted to cover up for what I saw as the disadvantage of my relatively younger age and brag about the films I had completed watching. I owe most of my awareness of films to this very quality of envy over others. 

I remember downloading Taxi Driver for the first time with the zeal of a teenager on their first kiss. More than the film itself, I revelled in and savoured the period of waiting, knowing that the film would be mine to keep in just a few more hours. I might have slept late and woken up at dawn to supervise the download, and seeing the full green bar bearing the words ‘Download completed. Seeding’ must have put me to an instant, satisfied sleep.

It was not until a few weeks later that I could get time to watch my prized download. I remember having dinner in a tasteless haste and impatiently brushing my teeth before jumping into my bed, all ready for school next day. I opened my laptop and navigated through to the folder which housed the film. Before I began, I remember running through all the raving reviews and plaudits the movie had amassed over the years. Assured that the film would not let me down, I finally double-clicked the video file and got down to it.

I’d be lying if I said the film had me from the word go. It took me a lot of effort, in fact, to follow the proceedings since the characters spoke in a thick accent and the New York colloquial tongue was impenetrable. The milieu in which the story unfolded was unfamiliar and cold, the characters spoke more and did less and the political overtones were lost to me in entirety. I did not find it to be an easy watch – not that I do today. Robert De Niro’s method acting pulled me in, and so did the vulnerability of a teenaged Jodie Foster. There were scenes, individual scenarios that captivated me and made me want to revisit them over and over again. To name one, there is this now-famous scene where a nocturnal passenger (played by Scorsese himself!) asks De Niro to stop on his street and look at the window of his apartment. He points out to the silhouetted window and tells him how his adulterous wife had his lover over in his absence. In what appears to be a manic bumbling, he vows to kill them both to the unsuspecting taxi driver. The menace and malice in his voice and body language unnerved me deeply, so much so that it remains, for me, the most easily recognisable few minutes of the film.

THIS scene

It took me about 3 viewings to gain a fuller understanding of Taxi Driver, but I won’t say I was swept off my feet by what I surmised. It was a contemplative picture, a complex but flawed exercise. The plot meanders like Travis Bickle’s cab at night-time, wanting ‘drive’ and vigour.  What bleeds on screen is a man’s urge to express freely and unshackled, without the tether of budgetary or logistical constraints. If for nothing else, Scorsese can be commended for his brave new artistic vision which he introduced in Taxi Driver. The frustration and insecurities of a young, working-class man in the USA of the 70s have scarcely ever been depicted with such intensity ever before or after.

However, the point of this post is not to dissect Taxi Driver; it is about my journey of understanding Scorsese through his movies. I saw Raging Bull next, but it failed to capture my imagination as much as its chronological predecessor. I found Jake La Motta’s chronicles excessively chatty and yappy to a fault, which did not entice me as a young, impatient viewer. I was probably too long fed with a brand of films that relied heavily on extraneous action and cheap thrills to form a smokescreen that made any other type of movies unapproachable. What had me more repulsed was the plasticity of the lifestyle that the film seemed to take almost flippantly.  Unabashed Infidelity, excessive violence, materialism, vanity and depravity ruled almost all actions and decisions made in the film. I was disappointed by the absence of a moral radar that I was so accustomed to seeing in any work of cinema. Taken aback at my failure to appreciate a film that the critics hailed as a favourite, I left my Martin Scorsese filmography incomplete and moved on to other, more instantly gratifying cinematic experiences (do not read ‘porn’).

Then I saw Goodfellas, and everything changed. There were still the typical Scorsese elements: excessive violence, uncouth dialogues and an unmistakable disdain for the limits of social propriety, but it was all done very stylistically and spiritedly. I related to De Niro’s gangster because of the very reasons I disliked them in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Here was a man, a young, youthful and hopeful man who was raring to make it big in life, trumping all odds that came his way. Deeply flawed and almost always on the wrong side of law, these men made themselves loved by their intrinsic lust for life.

Yes, lust; that is the word. All of Martin Scorsese’s protagonists are lusty and lively, self-aggrandising and larger than life. They aspire to be bigger and greater than the world around them would like them to. This is a predictable curve in almost all of his films: the first act sees a rookie, a new kid-on-the-block rising through the ranks, only their talent and/or dogged determination to keep them company. The second act is where things start to get messy and the empire our hero has established begins to crumble due to their flawed foundations. The denouement chronicles his (yes, it’s almost always a ‘he’) eventual but inevitable downfall, the souring of the once-thriving dream. However, despite all failures and setbacks, the protagonists more or less make peace with their present modest conditions. They give up their grand plans, but their hope is well intact, and that is the whole point of a Scorsese movie.

This brings me to The Wolf of Wall Street. In it, Martin Scorsese has perfected this idea and presented it in the most enchanting visual manner. Assisted greatly by a daring act by Leonardo Di Caprio (give that man an Oscar already!) and a production team that gets almost everything right, the master has clearly hit his peak with his latest outing. The film oozes with passion and energy, a youthful vitality that seems missing in all the other releases last year. This, coming from a septuagenarian, is a wonder in itself; it is hard to think of any of his contemporaries conceiving such an irreverent and audacious film in today’s day and age. Trust only him to find books that follow the aforementioned plot map to a T, and to adapt them in a unique and value-added way.

The biggest drug

Many will hate The Wolf of Wall Street for its casual approach and questionable subject matter, others will be put off by its over usage of the f-word (506 times in total). Some will find it silly and brainless, while others will criticise its apparent misogyny and unapologetic objectification of women. There will, however, be a sizeable group that will admit it is just too much fun to be missed over these mere trivialities.

“Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones.”

-Irving Stone