You Can't Cheat An Honest Man -- or can you?

Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill's characters discuss their legal options.

There are a certain amount of feathers ruffled among traditional business circles about the rampant amorality to be found in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) a black-comedy romp directed by Martin Scorsese that could be described as "Goodfellas without the murders."  Personally, I believe you should be suspicious of anyone who is offended by the fact that the characters in the story receive only minimal incarceration and fines for their extensive misdeeds and appear to learn nothing from the whole debacle.  At the end they are just as greedy and stupid as they were at the start.

Being offended by such things is just silly.  First, the punishments administered adhere to the facts of the true-life case, which acknowledge the extensive assistance the defendants gave in making cases against other malefactors.  Second, if incarceration and fines comprises your concept of punishment, you need to check your moral compass.  Third, people rarely learn and scarcely ever change.  Certainly, legal sanctions rarely have the power to instill a genuine sense of right and wrong in a sociopath -- only a surface understanding of what the social expectations are.  (To this day, the person on whom DiCaprio's character is based has not made complete payment of the restitution due from his plea deal of 10 years ago.)

One of the things Scorsese does best is make films about closed social groups.  Mean Streets, Goodfellas, After Hours, The Age of Innocence, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Departed, Shutter Island all deal with tight-knit communities and the way they can close ranks against outsiders.  (Not surprising considering Scorsese's own background.  Incidentally, his other great mode is the story of the Loner, also unsurprising when you know how much time he spent alone, sick in bed, as a child. Many spectators have complained that Wolf does not show the damage caused to decent citizens and their financial security by its characters' depredations.  The answer is simple -- the film is told from the characters' point-of-view (DiCaprio frequently addresses the audience directly).  They had no idea of, nor any concern for, the effect of their actions on anyone else -- that's the nature of a sociopathic personality.  It is true, there is no one in the film that expresses moral disdain for what is happening.  Even the FBI man played by Kyle Chandler is mostly anxious for the kill, for the success of the hunt, for bringing down the big target, than for rendering justice in any cosmic sense.  He's also a career builder, albeit one who is content with his modest means.

Judgment, says Mr. Scorsese, is for you, the audience.  If you're not up to that, you may not be up to a Scorsese film.

Incidentally, I had never known Mr. S to be a maestro of slapstick comedy, but the sequence illustrated above, exhibits some of the best physical comedy seen since Peter Sellers's stuntmen retired.  Mr. DiCaprio's character has taken an inordinate number of Quaaludes which suddenly take delayed effect, rendering him incapable of walking or talking.  The way he slithers into his Lamborghini, opening the gull-wing door with an exquisite scissor-leg move, and then tries to prevent Jonah Hill's character from talking on the bugged telephone, in a slow-motion, rubber-muscled tussle on the floor, can only be compared with this masterpiece:

The 1980s con games in Wolf of Wall Street are relatively crude, especially when compared with CDOs and the other entertaining manipulations of the 2002-2008 period.  American Hustle (2013), on the other hand, manages to con even the audience, including your obedient servant, a lifelong Jerseyite, convincing me that the 1970s-era story was shot on my native soil, whereas it was made entirely in Massachusetts (those rapscallions!).  Whereas DiCaprio invites you along on the ride, though he lies right to your face, Christian Bale's character would like to keep you and everyone else at arm's length so you can't see how the faux-hair is pasted on under the combover and exactly what is hidden up his sleeve.

Bradley Cooper adjusts Christian Bale's accoutrements.

Thusly, the film pulls some remarkable surprises and a full-out concluding con comparable to the finale of The Sting, yet it doesn't seem to be about that.  And what's more, unlike Wolf, Hustle toys with your notions of who is the good guy and who is the bad guy and everything in between.

Two slam-dunk predictions, and a few chancier ones.  Hustle will be nominated for Costumes (they make a huge contribution to both the atmosphere and in establishing the characters) and for Jennifer Lawrence as Best Supporting Actress.  She is truly the new Meryl Streep, in that she disappears into variegated roles, and, I would argue, disappears much more completely into them.  Her Rosalyn is rife with telling detail.  (No disrespect to Amy Adams, although one wonders why David O. Russell gets work out of her that no other director does.  Is that they don't think to ask?)  Presuming there will be 10 Best Picture Nominees, Hustle will make the cut (and Wolf probably will, too).  Russell will be nominated as director, and the screenplay will be as well.

Beside the dodgy relationships with money, Wolf and Hustle have much in common stylistically.  Rapid dolly-in shots and fast cuts, bright colors in the design (especially the retro clothes in both films), nostalgic soundtracks (American Hustle offers some real boomer-bait).  But thematically, they part company over the old con-man ethic expressed in the title of this post.  Irving Rosenthal, the role played by Christian Bale (who will not be nominated because toward the end of the film he appears to be channeling DeNiro), is a true classic con, who can live with himself morally because he only cheats those who want something for nothing, or an unfair advantage over another person.  You Can't Cheat An Honest Man, they say.  You take money from those who deserve to be taken.  And Rosenthal refuses to hurt the people that matter to him.  That puts him 180-degrees diametrically opposed to Jordan Belfont, DiCaprio's character, who has no idea and no concern who he hurts and how.  These films live comfortably side by side, yet inhabit totally different moral universes.

But don't take it from me when you can get it from the horse's mouth.

Spoof of a travesty

Wet Hot American Summer (2001) was the first quasi-official feature film project of the sketch comedy group The State. I've already discussed the transition into feature films by Derrick Comedy, another NYU-based group. Actually the 15 intervening years between The State and Derrick say something about the development of cutting edge comedy in the US. The State was a theater and video oriented group, transitioning easily to episodic television, especially with Monty Python as a model. Derrick Comedy is from the age of YouTube, in which the short film is the primary mode. The former tends toward absurdism, non sequitur and repeating characters. The latter tends toward parody and burlesque, but with a narrative basis. The contrast between the two groups is virtually a perfect statement of the essential differences between theater and film.

As an example, consider the difference in the way the groups approach the concept of a "character." In Mystery Team, the three leads play characters which are absurd and bizarre, but who are consistent, interact with other characters in plausible ways, feel emotions, grow and change. Characters on The State are primarily vehicle for comedic concepts, such as Louie the Guy Who Repeats His Catch Phrase. This is not meant to bear any relationship with a human being. It is not even a springboard for actual comedy. It is a comment on the very idea of comedy, specifically the threadbare device of running characters and their tired catch phrases. (I think Ricky Gervais nailed this topic in the second season of Extras, where the cardboard character and his hackneyed catchphrase became an albatross for Gervais.)

In point of fact, The State's best film work is the sketch comedy The Ten, riffing on the Ten Commandments. It almost seems like a Python premise. Of the ten sketches, three or four of them are gut-bustingly funny. But The Ten is not a real movie, any more than And Now For Something Completely Different is.

Wet Hot American Summer tries to have it both ways, or even three ways. It is primarily a parody of low-budget 1980s slob comedies (specifically camp comedies such as Meatballs), an object of nostalgia for people who graduated college in the late 80s and early 90s, like The State. So there are a number of gross-out jokes, some simple mistaken identity gags, sex frustration and crazy weird character gags, like the insane chef portrayed by Chris Meloni.

Sec0nd, like the films being parodied, WHAS would also like to establish characters with whom you sympathize and about whose ultimate fate you are supposed to care (I don't). Hence, there is a lukewarm romance between Janeane Garafolo and David Hyde Pierce, sex comedyu threads for Ken Marino and Michael Showalter, a weird romantic thread for Paul Rudd and Elizabeth Banks, and one for Amy Poehler and Bradley Cooper, which somehow culminates in a wedding between Bradley Cooper and Michael Ian Black, evidently the only stable and well-balanced romantic pairing in the movie.

Third, the film wants the freedom to make non sequitur sketch-type gags, regardless of what they do to the continuity or plausibility of the film. Hence the most famous sequence of the film, in which the counselors go to town for an hour to relax and get away, start mugging the citizens for drug money, wind up in a crack den and return happily to camp, none the worse for their hour of getting away from those pesky kids. Or Paul Rudd can make out while letting campers drown without apparent consequences. Or Janeane Garafolo can go ballistic when a camper is in trouble, begin screaming for a phone and proceed to trash the camp nurse's office, losing all sight of the object of the panic--finding a phone--and just knock everything to the floor and scream, ignoring the phone that is there. And in the final talent show sequence, one character can cause Skylab to land harmlessly in the middle of the camp with his mind--again, regardless of the facts about Skylab.

The fact is that the crazy stuff is the most fun and provokes the most outright laughter, but it also makes it impossible to accept WHAS as an actual movie. I trace this whole line of films back to Blazing Saddles, which was the first full-length burlesque I can remember, and which quickly abandoned all claims to plausibility, identification or narrative flow. The trap is that once you discard those elements of filmmaking, then your jokes must be awesome and constant. In Airplane, the flow of jokes is steady, but the quality tails off drastically. Blazing Saddles can't even find an ending, repeatedly deconstructing itself into boredom. Mel Brooks himself realized that this format was a dead end, and returned to sympathetic characters and a real story arc with the next film, Young Frankenstein (conceived by Gene Wilder).

Members of The State seems to have realized it and dialed it back in subsequent years, writing screenplays for the Night at the Museum series, a couple of the Herbie movies, Role Models, the tedious Reno 911 series and movie, Balls of Fury and the best feature work attributable to this group, Michael Ian Black's first-rate screenplay for Run, Fatboy, Run. But none of these aspire to the groundbreaking type of humor that The State once stood for.

So the question comes down to--how funny do you want to be? 'Cause for maximum laughs, you may have to blow up your own movie.

An "Anti-80's Movie" 80's Movie

I'm a decade too old to share in 80's nostalgia. I was busy starting a family and a career and my recollection of that time was that between the music, the fashions and the politics, Americans were ready to accept any pile of horsehockey that was thrown at them. The zeitgeit of the me-decade 70s was nauseating enough, but the mantra of the 80s seems to have been, "whatever."

Therefore I can approach a film set in the 1980s, such as Adventureland (2009) without any patina of nostalgia and say it's a pretty decent coming-of-age romance. My recollection is that the film had a disappointing release earlier this year, because it was marketed as the next film from the director of Superbad. And while Bill Heder and Kristine Wiig are on hand to provide a little Second City-SNL vibe, they are in fact minor characters. And there is no evocation of the cheap slapstick, T&A teen comedies of the period.

So the question is, why the 1980's? Evidently this was an autobiographical piece, and the writer/director's own youth was some 20 years ago, but there is absolutely nothing in the story that demands this time period. I could have told a similar story of my own college summer job in the mid-1970's. I'm sure my kids and their friends could tell the exact same story in contemporary terms. Meanwhile, the clothes and hair just clouded the issue, as their very appearance seems to call for irony and ridicule that this sweet little film refused to traffic in.

This is where producing comes in. It cost the film extra production expense and difficulty to create the retro setting, and it brought on confusion in the marketing phase of the film. It is hard to see the upside of the 80's setting--it only made a difference to the director, who like so many directors on their commentary tracks, spends most of the time discussing the records they selected for the soundtracks. Why don't these guys just make a mixtape (yes, there's one in the plot of the movie) and leave their nostalgia home?

Even the amusement park setting was wasted. This story would have been exactly the same at a burger joint. It appears as though the director felt this was a more unique and individual picture than it actually is--there's really nothing startling or new here, although it is well-acted and pleasant throughout. This feels like a classic case of premature indulgence of auteurism. Which is not to say it's not a nice little picture--just a terribly misleading one.