Is the age of the White Male Scumbag Antihero officially over? With an actual white male scumbag as our current president, it’s become harder and harder for some viewers to sympathize with crass lowlife protagonists who lie, cheat, seduce and even murder their way through prestige dramas on screens large and small. What’s even more difficult is that many of these forays into drama (think “Boardwalk Empire” and “Sons of Anarchy”) are too enamored with their bad-boy heroes to let them off the hook: the character’s sheer, blistering charisma is ultimately what redeems them, not anything they’ve actually done to earn our respect as a viewer.
Movies like Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” — the last truly great American movie that I can think of that fully embraced the now-dated Antihero composite for its depiction of ruthless Wall Street con artist Jordan Belfort — walk an especially tricky tightrope. That is because these films are both a critique of this loathsome, All-American archetype, and also an undeniable indulgence in the very real superficial pleasures that the lifestyles of these characters can afford. Scorsese’s refusal to paint his reptilian money-grubbers in broad, moralistic strokes was admirable by my estimation, and yet there were moments where I feared that screenwriter Terence Winter (who knows a thing or two about this kind of entertainment, having been the principal creative mind behind both “Boardwalk Empire” and “Vinyl”) was a little too in love with Belfort’s swaggering alpha-asshole routine to dig too deep beneath the surface.
All of this begs the question: how much longer can these kinds of stories, with alternately glorify and condemn their reprehensible heroes, last in the popular sphere? With inclusive and compassionate films like “Moonlight” finally seeing acceptance in mainstream circles, will it be long before audiences turn their backs on films that celebrate — indirectly or directly — the misdeeds of shitty white men?
Abel Ferrara’s raw and galvanic “Welcome to New York” gets almost all of its bad behavior out of the way in its first thirty minutes. There is rough sex talk, and then actual rough sex, some pill-popping, and then unruly, fetishistic indulgence where ice cream and champagne are smeared over naked flesh: the kind of unsavory spectacle that the controversial New York filmmaker has been shooting for over thirty years. Then, a third of the way through, there is an assault — a sexual assault, and one of the most upsetting I’ve ever seen depicted onscreen. And then, for the remaining hour and thirty minutes, Ferrara drags the human pig who committed this assault through a hell of his own making. There are no super-sexy montages set to Rolling Stones songs, no studio-approved attempts at humanizing this monster. There is just evil, enabled by privilege and wealth, before an extended and brutal debasement.
Abel Ferrara is a filmmaker who knows a thing or two about brutal debasement — in his life as well as his films. The director’s trajectory has been one of the most fascinating in modern cinema: he came up in the pre-Giuliani New York grindhouse scene, directing fevered exploitation classics like “The Driller Killer” and the feminist revenge film “Ms. 45”. Somewhere in the early 90’s, Ferrara made a brief ascent into the mainstream and became a critical favorite with scabrous outlaw classics like his gonzo “Bad Lieutenant,” one of the most influential movies of the decade, the funereal, Christopher Walken-starring crime epic “King of New York” and the underrated gangster reverie “The Funeral”. These were films that married the arthouse with the grindhouse: sleaze epics, drenched in scum and sweat, but painted the brush strokes of a real artist.
The drug use and chaos in Ferrara’s movies has always seemed scarily real, and part of that is because Ferrara was actually using drugs at the time. And indeed, when the director’s erratic on-set behavior became too much for studios to invest in, funding for his films dried up. The newly sober Ferrara has, however, made something of a mini-comeback in recent years, starting with “Welcome to New York” — which earned the director his best reviews in years, most of them lavishing praise on Gerard Depardieu’s fearless turn as a barely-veiled caricature of Dominique-Strauss Kahn, former director of the IMF who was disgraced after allegations that he raped a hotel maid — and continuing with his recent “Pasolini,” a formally ambitious attempt to depict the inner life of one of history’s most controversial artists.
I shudder to think of the committee-approved, Academy-friendly version of this story that we may have gotten from the likes of the Weinstein Company. What Ferrara brings to the film is grit and his trademark crude honesty, the kind you’d ordinarily hear from the greasy old guy who hangs out at your local dive bar. The scenes where Depardieu’s wealthy, bloated predator is escorted through New York City’s merciless penitentiary halls and humiliated by police officers carry the sting of real, unrehearsed experience.
Of course, Ferrara knows a thing or two about how cops talk — I’m assuming the director has spent some time in a holding cell before — and he most definitely knows how New Yorkers talk. “Cut that tough guy shit out,” an officer tells Depardieu’s character early on. “You ain’t in France no more.” There’s a ground-level intensity and potent lack of Antihero romanticizing to “Welcome to New York” that, even if it can’t match the dizzying highs of Ferrara’s best work, justifies the notion that he was probably one of the only filmmakers alive who could tell this story.
Then again, I return to the question I posed near the beginning of this piece: why tell this story at all? Though the movie is ultimately admirable in its refusal to humanize or normalize its main character, this is still a film about an unrepentant, calculating, inhuman sociopath who freely admits that he feels nothing. At least the crack-smoking hero of “Bad Lieutenant” had some twisted sense of purpose — remember, he was looking for a trio of thugs who raped and murdered a nun, at least in between hits of freebase. The main character of “Welcome to New York” merely has his endless wealth and privilege, which he uses as a kind of cocoon to protect himself from the consequences of the real, undeniable harm he’s done. Sound like anybody you know?
The Donald Trump parallels did not make headlines when “Welcome to New York” briefly played in American movie houses back in 2015 — mainly because, at that point, Mr. Trump was still a reality-television outlier as opposed to a daily, waking threat to our way of life. And yet, watching Ferrara’s repulsive characterization now, it’s hard not to see the similarities. Of course, Mr. Trump has been accused of many vile affronts, and there have been instances where the man’s seemingly bottomless capacity for both cruelty and insensitivity have threatened to undo his entire charade.
Somehow, it has yet to happen, but that’s not a problem faced by Depardieu’s character, a French banker and Presidential hopeful simply called Devereaux. Devereaux spends “Welcome to New York’s” early stretch in a protective fantasyland of readily available escorts and curdled wealth. Though this is the kind of unwound bacchanalia that is portrayed in a great many randy sex comedies, there’s nothing alluring or even appealing about the spectacle of sin that Ferrara constructs in the movie’s early goings. Women arrive and leave Devereaux’s room with the same indifferent air as the service staff, which may be why Devereaux assumes that the hotel maid whom he rapes is just another sexual plaything for him to abuse. When we see this lonely, heartless man on his own — his formidable Beluga whale gut spilling over his beltline as he emits disturbing, boar-like grunts and wheezes in between tirades — we begin to understand the profound sense of emptiness that he attempts to mask with his ostentatious displays of privilege.
And yet, I want to emphasize this again, Ferrara never asks us to identify with or try and understand Devereaux’s point of view. In fact, “Welcome to New York” almost works better if you simply hate the character. There’s an undeniable, sadistic pleasure to be had in seeing this cowardly, wealthy weakling put through the wringer of New York’s famously harsh correctional system, and Depardieu is committed to the ferocity of every awful moment. He’s also particularly good in the movie’s later scenes, where Devereaux has to come to terms with his put-upon wife Simone (the wondrous Jacqueline Bisset).
These scenes underline what a pathetic creature Devereaux has become: even when he tries to embrace his wife in his moment of ultimate weakness, she recoils from his touch. It’s rare to see a public implosion (another subject Ferrara knows a thing or two about) depicted onscreen with such unflinching, even destabilizing realness. And yet, for better or worse, that’s ultimately what makes “Welcome to New York” stand out for the crowd. Whether or not you can enjoy the film, or if it makes you sick to your stomach, there’s no denying that Ferrara himself is still somehow real after all these years.
To be fair, I don’t know if all of this conjecture about the death of Antihero entertainment can really be tied to Ferrara’s film. I don’t believe that he’s ever been an explicitly political filmmaker, which is not the same thing as being an anti-authoritarian (that, the Bronx native most certainly is). And of course, I don’t believe films should need to spell everything out for their audiences in digestible, hand-holding strokes: that’s why some viewers see “The Wolf of Wall Street” as a devastating, brilliant black comedy about the insidious nature of white-collar crime, while others may celebrate the deplorable behavior of its characters for all the wrong reasons. There’s moral ambiguity in Mr. Scorsese’s universe, but in “Welcome to New York,” Mr. Ferrara paints an unforgiving moral universe in harsh, monochromatic shades of black and white. It’s an ugly film, but one that boldly refuses to sugarcoat the awfulness of its White Male Scumbag Antihero, right until the movie’s bitter climax. As a counterpoint to much of today’s stylized Antihero entertainment, it’s powerful viewing… if you can stomach it.
