Plot points of 12 Years a Slave, The Wolf of Wall Street, and several older Scorsese films discussed below.
I want to discuss in depth a point I didn’t have room to make in my Wolf of Wall Street review; specifically, whether one can empathize with an objectively bad, undoubtedly immoral character. But before looking at Wolf of Wall Street, I’d like us to take a moment to consider the most interesting character in 12 Years a Slave: Master Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch).
Ford is that weird oxymoron in the antebellum south, the "decent" slave owner. He obviously cares for his chattel and isn’t so blinded by white supremacy that he cannot acknowledge Solomon’s (Chiwetel Ejiofor) talents. He reads scripture to his slaves in order to save their souls and presents them with gifts, such as the violin given to Solomon, to aid in their spiritual uplift. When Ford finds Solomon struggling for breath, half-strung-up for assaulting a white overseer, he is clearly enraged by the man’s mistreatment, cutting him down, taking him into the big house, and nursing his wounds.
And yet. When it comes down to it—when Ford learns Solomon is no slave; when Ford must decide how to proceed—the "decent" slave owner balks at doing the right thing and letting him go free. There’s a mortgage to pay on this human, after all. The system is not designed for random acts of decency. So he will hand Solomon over to a cruel master who delights in whipping underperforming cotton pickers. It is totally understandable to empathize with Ford—who has shown himself to be a caring, understanding man and is caught in a tight economic spot—while also utterly rejecting his behavior and judging him harshly.
Martin Scorsese’s filmography is littered with such men. Consider Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro), the eponymous Raging Bull. Here is a man with few redeeming qualities: he is loutish, he is brutish, he is abusive. Yet we still feel sympathy for him when, after working hard and enduring brutal beatings, he is forced to take a dive by the mob so he can have a title shot in the future. As he sits in his dressing room, bawling like a baby, we empathize with this philandering bully. Similarly, when he languishes in prison near the film’s end, punching a wall in frustration for having wasted his life, we can’t help but cringe and pity him. Does that excuse his previous behavior? Of course not. Scorsese has no interest in portraying Jake La Motta as a good man. Just a man.
Similarly, in Goodfellas, we are presented with a conundrum in Henry Hill (Ray Liotta). The character’s character flaws are perhaps best summed up early on, when young Henry is first jumping into the world of the mob. In a voiceover, he explains the main benefit of mafia life: It was a way for a kid with nothing from nowhere to get respect. We see young Henry smashing out the windows of a string of expensive cars, pouring gas into them, lighting a match, and running away. As the cars explode, the scene freezes, a fire blazing in the background. The voiceover continues: "One day, some of the kids in the neighborhood carried my mother’s groceries all the way home. You know why? It was outta respect."
The juxtaposition—the visual representation of an awful, illegal, destructive act and the intellectual representation of why one would partake in such an awful, illegal, destructive act—is a stroke of genius on Scorsese and co-writer Nicholas Pileggi’s part. Without holding the audience’s hand or spelling the morality of the situation out in bright, neon letters, he is showing us why those in the mob do terrible things. To explain a behavior and to empathize with a miscreant is not to excuse the misdeed or wrongdoer.
Which brings us to Wolf of Wall Street. My feelings on the subject should be abundantly clear: Those who think Scorsese is engaged in some sort of moral dodge are, frankly, deluded. There are a number of criticisms to be leveled at the film—it’s at least 45 minutes too long; it wallows in its own crapulence; it is often repetitive—but a lack of moral clarity regarding Jordan Belfort (Leonardo Di Caprio) isn’t really one of them.
Indeed, we’re barely asked to empathize with Belfort on an emotional level; the only scene in which he is played as sympathetic in the slightest comes near the end when a female stockbroker praises him for taking a chance on her and rescuing her from poverty with a $25,000 check. Instead we are overwhelmed with images of Caligulan decadence: nude women, mounds of drugs, fast cars, big boats. He cheats on his first wife and beats his second. He doesn’t care about the suffering he inflicts on the investors he deludes or the workers he abuses. While discussing the legal ramifications of using midgets as lawn darts he refers to a dwarf as "it" rather than "he," a grotesquely dehumanizing sentiment attached to an entirely hilarious scene.
Like Henry Hill before him, we can understand why an ambitious and amoral kid with a taste for nice clothes and nice cars would partake in grossly illegal behavior to make grossly large sums of money. But the degradation and filth that surrounds Belfort and his lackeys make it clear that these are not decent people. They are decidedly indecent, a decadent and unethical band of hyenas. Documenting their excess isn’t a celebration, as some have suggested: It’s an indictment.