Tag: Leonardo DiCaprio

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: An Epic Masterpiece

Last night Peggy and I accompanied Peggy’s brother to a local theater to see Quentin Tarantino’s “Once upon a Time in Hollywood.” All of us came away disappointed and wondering why we didn’t leave the theater about half an hour into this two-hour-forty-five-minute marathon, even though it featured A-list actors including Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and Al Pacino. We all agreed the film was too long, too slow, too violent, and on the whole seemed pointless.

I’m glad we didn’t leave. After-thought has made me realize that we would have missed a thought-provoking and revealing parable about entertainment-fantasy and its influence on our lives. Even more, the film had the epic quality of all the great classics, Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses. It was about our lives’ journeys, their purpose, about love and friendship.

After all, the film’s very title alerts the viewer to Tarantino’s larger intent. “Once upon a time” is the way all fairy tales, myths, legends, and fables begin. They are vehicles for teaching larger truths — for rewriting history. Typically, they feature:

  • A main character (all of us) facing decline and death
  • A long, twisted journey
  • Its quest for meaning in the second half of life
  • The character’s double who is more grounded and wiser
  • A child who inspires and teaches
  • An alternative community representing the story’s readers
  • And mirroring the condition of the main characters
  • Class struggle between the communities
  • A blind man who more clearly sees life’s true purpose
  • A dog who saves the day
  • All resulting in insight about how our lives might be different

Significantly, “Once upon a Time in Hollywood” is set in 1969, the year of the bloody murder of actress, Sharon Tate, her unborn child, and four of Tate’s friends at the hands of the infamous Charles Manson family of hippie stoners. In fact, the whole story can be understood as a commentary on that tragic event as encapsulating American life with its senseless violence specifically provoked by the art of directors such as Quintin Tarantino. As such Tarantino’s own film is a kind of self-parody – yet another feature often characterizing the great literature just referenced.    

“Once upon a Time in Hollywood” is about a washed-up TV actor, Tom Dalton and his stunt-man double, Cliff Booth. Tom’s an actor whose identity has been fixed by the success of his past role as an old West bounty hunter. Everybody knows him that way. But in mid-life, he suddenly finds himself jobless, filled with self-doubt and lacking clear direction. He wants to maintain his Hollywood image and lifestyle and is terrified with the prospect of losing them. Who is he without his on-screen role? He’s afraid of death and life’s inevitable call to enter its second half.

Meanwhile, Tom’s stunt-man double (his real self) is a doer. He’s entirely capable of accomplishing in real life, what Tom does only in film. Whereas Tom pretends to be brave, take chances, fall off horses, fight and prevail, Cliff actually does those things. What’s more, Cliff’s not worried about his image or living large. He’s content to be in effect Tom’s butler and chauffeur. His home is a beat-up Airstream trailer; he eats Kraft Macaroni, and his only companion is his fierce and obedient pit bull, Brandy. The dog is actually Cliff’s better half; like his master, he’s simple, faithful, loving, and valiant. Brandy is to Cliff what Cliff is to Tom.

So, shadowed by his double and better-self, Tom sets off on his journey. Tarantino drives the theme home by introducing virtually every character in terms of their footwear – cowboy boots, sandals, go-go boots, and bare feet.  Everybody’s on a journey. Tom’s own has him advised by standard Hollywood types – always telling him how to cope with life’s changes by adopting new roles, different costumes, makeup, facial hair, and public image. For them, everything is image and performance.

However, Tom’s best professional advice comes from an eight-year-old girl far wiser than her years. Trudi Fraser tells Dalton to sober up, pay attention to his craft, be true to himself in the roles he plays, and never break character. As a result of listening to her, Tom delivers his greatest performance in a film called Lancer. For him, it’s the turning point in his professional journey. Yet, we find, there’s much more for him to learn. Life’s not merely about professional success.

It’s his better self, Cliff Booth, who makes the deeper discovery.  And ironically, it’s the Manson Family who conveys that truth. Led on by a flirtatious Siren, Cliff suddenly finds himself in the midst of the Manson family. Significantly, they live in an abandoned movie lot owned by a declined movie mogul, George Spahn.  

Over the objections of the Manson Family members, Cliff insists on consulting his former colleague who turns out to be a blind oracle revealing life’s true meaning. He’s Booth’s interior voice who’s deeply asleep and must be shaken back into awareness. Sightless, old George can’t even remember his former meaningless life. He doesn’t recognize Booth or remember who Tom Dalton is. He only knows that Squeaky Fromme (Manson’s best-known disciple) loves him and that he wants to please her. Loving her is what’s truly important to him, nothing else.

Moreover, the Manson community itself teaches Booth. It proves to be deeper and more loving than the Hollywood assemblage of self-seeking individuals that the Manson Clan mirrors. Yes, they spend their lives in exactly the same way of their better-off counterparts. They even live on an abandoned movie lot and spend their days watching old movies on TV. For them, it’s all sex, drugs, and rock and roll.  

However, overwhelmingly composed of women, the Mansons have abandoned the Culver City rat race. They dumpster-dive for food. But more importantly, they exhibit solidarity, sympathy and support for members who suffer or are in danger.

The contrast leads them on the one hand to resent the actual self-centered lives of Hollywood personalities, and on the other to imitate their on-screen violence. (Here’s where the class-struggle comes in.) They reason: The films we’ve watched from childhood have taught us lessons. The actors we’ve admired have advocated senseless violence, and they live like selfish pigs. So, let’s get our revenge and do some violence on them.”

And that brings us to Tarantino’s ironic, over-the top, cleansing and healing climax. (Spoiler alert!) In a riot of shooting, stabbing, beating and burning, Hollywood’s fantasy triumphs over real life. The heroic dog, Brandy comes to the rescue; the Mansons are decimated; Sharon Tate, her child and her friends are saved. History is re-written.

But more importantly, in terms of Tarantino’s fabulous intent, Tom Dalton and Cliff Booth discover their actual identity with one another. The two halves of Tom’s personality are united in expressions of their deep friendship. Tom gets over himself and joins a larger community of literally resurrected souls.

As a result, all of us are called to resurrection, love, and friendship. We’re called to own our True Selves.

I’m glad we stayed to watch it all.

Taking Pope Francis to the Movies: “The Wolf of Wall Street” (Film Review)

Wolf of Wall Street

A friend of mine says that if a picture is worth a thousand words, a good documentary film is worth a million. I agree, and would add that a great Hollywood drama directed by someone like Martin Scorsese and starring headliners like Leonardo DiCaprio might be worth two million or more.

Consider “The Wolf of Wall Street” as a case in point. It’s worth a library of dissertations on the dead-end and destructive nature of consumerism so recently criticized by Pope Francis in his Papal Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium – the document intended to keynote his still-emerging reign as head of the Roman Catholic Church.

The pontiff’s publication distanced the pope and his church from the destructive emptiness of lives depicted in Scorsese’s “Wolf.” Pope Francis criticized consumerism based on the obscene accumulation of wealth without concern for the poor or the common good. He condemned “structures” that encourage such behavior. He turned a disapproving eye on education intended to domesticate rather than liberate the poor.

Such features of unfettered markets find lurid depiction in Scorsese’s film. There the over-the-top excesses of the Stratton-Oakmont investment firm amount to a send-up of the American Way of Life in general. At one point the film’s main protagonist, Jordan Belfort (played brilliantly by Leonardo DiCaprio) correctly makes Scorsese’s point, “Stratton-Oakmont is America” he proclaims. By this Belfort means his firm represents a vehicle of salvation for the poor. The film’s narrative suggests contrary conclusions.

“Wolf’s” story is simple. Ne’er-do-wells and petty crooks (DiCaprio and his friends) quickly make millions in the Penny Stock Market. They then use their money to fund frenzied lives of meaningless “work” and ultimately of crime and absolute debauchery with prostitutes, drugs and liquor.

The firm’s “work” consists in selling worthless paper products – stocks (of whose content they are often totally ignorant) – to gullible clients anxious to make a quick buck.

The firm’s crimes include “pump and dump” schemes which have them artificially inflating stock prices and then selling them quickly while leaving their bilked customers holding bags-full of depreciated investments. These quick profits are then laundered and deposited in the Swiss bank accounts that Wall Street wolves have long provided themselves to escape any social obligation or criminal charges for their irresponsible depredations.

All of this eventually leads to arrests. However, as a white collar criminal, DiCaprio’s character gets treated with kid gloves. He serves a three year sentence in a minimum security “country club” prison playing tennis and getting lots of r ‘n r.

On his release, recidivist Belfort doesn’t miss a beat. He simply resumes the very career he was hawking in an infomercial the day he was arrested – as a teacher of yet more get-rich-quick aspirants. Presumably they too seek millions by mirroring Belfort’s life of parasitism, debauchery and crime. The life is attractive because of its huge short-term payoffs. And Belfort’s example shows such felonies involve little risk to their perpetrators and absolutely no responsibility to others.

Through it all DiCaprio’s gang ridicule law, ethics, the poor, and those not devious enough to take advantage of economic, political and legal structures that facilitate plunder. In fact, the poor are virtually absent from Scorsese’s three-hour long parody.

The one person who perhaps falls into that category is celebrated at one of Belfort’s lewd and rowdy “staff meetings.” She’s singled out because she was smart enough to enrich herself by joining the Stratton-Oakmont project of fraud and deceit. In so doing she landed herself on what her mentor sees as his re-creation of Ellis Island – a zone of hope and liberation for the poor. Tearfully grateful, she too now has her limousine, yacht, and vacations in the Bahamas. What more could anyone ask?

Pope Francis answers that question. So do the divorces, addictions, insecurities and instances of child abuse in Scorsese’s film. Along with Pope Francis, they show that life and happiness are not about such self-seeking. But the pope goes further than Scorsese, boldly insisting that human life is about the common good and service of the poor. To facilitate such service, he asks for (no: he demands) fundamental change in the world that makes possible the get-rich-quick schemes like those characteristic of Wall Street and embodied in Stratford-Oakmont. More specifically Pope Francis calls for:

• Rejection of the free market model of development for combating poverty. Contrary to Jordan Belfort’s vision of a new Ellis Island, Stratton-Oakmont is not the solution to world poverty, inequality or violence. Rather, according to the pope such firms with their “trickle-down” ideologies represent the root of the problems in question.

• Centralization of ethics in the business world. Though not enumerated by Francis, the principles here are simple: Don’t lie; don’t steal, don’t engage in sexual conduct harmful to others; treat others as you would like to be treated; recognize that one reaps what he or she sows. These mandates recognized in all great religious traditions are not only routinely violated by the Belfort gang; they are ridiculed and their abuses flaunted. This, according to Pope Francis is the way of the world dominated as it is by consumerism and loosely regulated markets.

• Incorporation of the viewpoints of the poor in policy discussions – instead of treating the “little people” as freaks, instruments, nobodies and fools as in the Stratton-Oakmont boardroom discussion about using “midgets” for staff entertainment.

• Recognition of “education” like that offered by Jordan Belfort for what it is – a means of tranquilizing and domesticating the marginalized and otherwise excluded.

• Reformation of legal structures that facilitate the quick capital accumulation responsible for huge gaps between the rich and the poor. Reformations suggested both by Scorsese and Pope Francis include not only tighter regulation of stock exchanges and financial markets, but elimination of instruments such as Swiss bank accounts, and laws that coddle white collar mega-criminals while placing victimless petty “criminals” of color (such as those caught possessing crack cocaine) in maximum security facilities.

These are just a few of the directions Francis calls the world to follow.

“The Wolf of Wall Street” supports his call by illustrating its need in a picture worth much more than a million words.