Callum’s review published on Letterboxd:
Sell me this pen.
My favourite moment in The Wolf of Wall Street comes right towards the very end, just after Jordan has been convicted. And it's when Denham is on the subway, in and of itself a fulfillment of Jordan's earlier mockery on the boat, reading the headline newspaper. And he folds it over, and looks around the car. And nobody cares. It's only a small scene but I love it, neither Belfort or Denham are particularly recognised for their character outside the confines of the story. Denham's big bust goes uncelebrated, and Belfort's larger than life carnivalesque performance we've seen throughout the film makes no real splash outside of his very secular and contained world.
Scorsese's films are often about grand and corrupt characters, but Wolf stands next to something like The Irishman in how by the end Scorsese is toying with the legacy of these men. I find it deeply interesting that the only answer Scorsese can come up with by the time the credits roll is that Belfort will always be who he is and there's not much to be done about that. It's bleak, and a very somber moment in such an explosion and expansive film, but one that feels thoroughly earned. Belfort as a character, not necessarily as a man, has almost all the making of the Tragic Hero. However, he lacks the nobility that permits any heroic attributes about him. He doesn't have the capacity for goodness that facilitates the 'Hero' part of the title. He is entirely his hubris, a character with such a ruthless ambition that as he scrambles to keep hold of what relevance he might have - it just becomes pathetic.
Maybe that's why it's so good. Just like Raging Bull, or The Irishman, or many other Scorsese character studies, The Wolf of Wall Street is a moral indictment. Belfort's character, much like LaMotta in Raging Bull, is incapable of change. Where he begins and where he ends are relatively unchanged, only his circumstances do.
He can sell a mean pen though, I'll give him that.
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