The Con Man’s Eulogy

“Goodfellas,” Martin Scorsese’s tale of the rise and fall of a mobster, is still fresh in my mind. More than 20 years after it came out, the scene with Ray Liotta snorting cocaine to the strains of “Sunshine of Your Love” is indelibly impressed on my memory. And the funny moment with the corpse in the trunk that turns out to be still alive. Then the great ending, with Liotta joining a witness protection program to become just another sad, bored guy from the neighborhood.

I came out of that film thinking, “I want to be a mafioso. Please God, if you exist, make me a mafioso.”

Scorsese has done it again with his latest movie, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” based on the life of broker Jordan Belfort. Today’s major-league criminals pack subprime mortgages in place of firearms and threaten you with preferential purchase options instead of blowing your brains out. Only the cocaine lifestyle remains unchanged (some traditions are as ingrained as Christmas). So this time, Scorsese’s movie features not a gangster, but a swindling stockbroker.

The black humor is still the same as in “Goodfellas,” for all that. In an orgy of excess, the protagonist takes all the drugs he can, at the most inopportune moments. He hires prostitutes by the truckload. He hosts dwarf-throwing competitions. He pilots a helicopter drunk. The whole narrative is told with a hilarious cynicism and set to an unmissable soundtrack (Umberto Tozzi’s memorable “Gloria” accompanies the rescue from a luxury yacht split in two).

As a result, you come out of the film thinking, “I want to be a broker. God, if you make me a broker, I’ll cut you in for 20 percent.”

Needless to say, this comic portrayal of capitalist depravation has provoked plenty of controversy. Members of the Hollywood Academy and Belfort’s real-life victims have publicly expressed their disapproval. The actress Hope Holiday described the film as “disgusting crap.” The daughter of a broker betrayed by Belfort accused Scorsese of being “in league with a criminal.”

These people see Jordan Belfort as a repellent human being who should be depicted as such on film. His adventures should not come across as amusing; that suggests his behavior was acceptable and could even encourage others to imitate it.

I have to say to the critics of “The Wolf of Wall Street” that they can rest easy: I did not become a mafioso after seeing “Goodfellas.” Along with most people who saw the film, I got the feeling that exorbitant, arbitrary power destroys the person who wields it, too. I pondered it for a while, then another day I saw another movie. As far as I know, cinema-goers who have seen “The Wolf of Wall Street” have not automatically become stockbrokers either.

When the laughter has died down, Scorsese’s achievement is to make you realize that Belfort’s lunacy paid off because he was nourished by a financial system that rewarded people like him. His story is a fierce criticism of a society that has turned money into another drug, a denouncement of the hypocrisy of a culture that judges you solely on the basis of your financial clout.

The film’s critics think this will be lost on people who see the movie. They think the poor innocent public are so easily influenced that they are liable to rush right out of the movie theater and start snorting cocaine off the backsides of hookers — absurd, but not exactly new. There have been governments determined to protect the people from their own “innocence,” too: the Third Reich, for example. Hitler ordered the burning of licentious paintings and books of immoral tales. And we all know how much that improved their society.

Aristotle said, “Art imitates life.” Film is art. It reflects human beings just as we are, with all our strengths and weaknesses, and helps us to understand each other better. We should fear not the artist, but those who think us so feeble-minded that we need protection from our own selves. They are the real wolves at the door; we would be wise not to let them in.