Decoding Donnie Azoff: Jonah Hill’s misunderstood lynchpin in ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’
Goodfellas? We should be so lucky! These manicured fools are approximations of some of the worst bastards to ever blindly besiege society at large. Once again, with The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese returned to depicting truly despicable people without any irony or judgement. In fact, there are scenes whereby Jordan Belfort is even portrayed as heroic for gifting money to a single mother even though the sum is a minuscule fraction of what his unpaid taxes could’ve contributed to the underprivileged masses of America.
The beauty of the film lies in its duality: the laughable lurid surface plays out like a festival of debauchery but lurking beneath this carnivalesque mountain of vanities is a prescient message about how society run amok can become a freakshow. As ever, Scorsese sticks to his filmmaking mantra of being uncompromising without ever venturing into cynicism. It’s not his job to twist the narrative to fit a preordained message or curtail entertainment to deliver truth with a sense of one-sided solemnity. After all, Donald Trump was undeniably funny too, but his pitfalls should’ve been readily apparent.
As such, the mass misinterpretation of the film and its characters upon release stood as a signifier of the gaping flaws in modern civilisation. Every positive appraisal of Belford was a testimony to how many of us can be fooled into thinking these guys are funny loonies who valiantly grip life by the balls. A few head-shaving high-jinks had many forgetting that they are the same fat cats that fucked the world over while doing so. We laugh at the larks, but the bittersweet punchline is that these gaudy guffaws are the same reason we could barely afford the movie ticket. You could piss your pants laughing if Belford and his cronies hadn’t already pulled them down.
The key crony who reveals the meshuga at play is Donny Azoff. This ludicrous henchman is masterfully played by Jonah Hill in a performance that warranted an Oscar and a heap more recognition. But more so than that, he is a paradigm for the political zeitgeist. He spots a plush car in a parking lot and despairingly thinks ‘I want to be like him’. The parallel between that and a working-class denizen so beleaguered and disenfranchised by the system that they somehow saw salvation in the Billionaire from birth, Donald Trump, is a spookily prescient sign.
While Wolf of Wall Street is, of course, unfortunately, based on a true story, Azoff is Scorsese’s fictional insertion. The fact that this satirical buffoon slips into the true story unnoticed is a worrisome masterstroke. He is a literal wanker, a misogynist, an incestophile, and most likely a psychopath. However, like fellow crazed banker Patrick Bateman, there is something about his self-willed vitality that proves oddly admirable, it’s just in Azoff’s case, his perversion is banging quaaludes not popping prostitutes.
It is his achievement that appeals to us. No matter where our politics lie, there are very few among us who wouldn’t want to be richer. Azoff boldly achieves this—he sees a car he wants, and soon enough he is driving one. If you don’t delve into the despicable methods behind that ‘glow-up’ then you have to doff your cap to the lad. This is how Scorsese humanises the financial crisis. He turns a manufactured disaster into a rip-roaring satire that we can all marginally relate to.
Loosely based on the “pump and dump” stockbroker Danny Porush, Azoff is an assimilation of everyone who self-servingly wormed their way to the top. And that is another key to his character, he introduces himself as working in children’s furniture. At no point, does he ever claim to or display any expertise in finances. The point being: if you’re willing to break the rules then you can make money in business. This is a point we so often miss in the age of status celebration, whereby flash cars are congratulated and honest bad luck is berated.
It’s not easy to make this funny, to make it appealing and laughably likeable, but Jonah Hill nails the superficial charm of the unlikely corporate psychopath. This madman is a jester throughout. He brings the humour, and vitally, he sustains it. While stresses catch up with Belford, the cocaine carnival of cash goes on for Azoff.
This is another prescient point about how modern scams can get out of hand. What might start off as someone simply trying to get ahead in business and break into a world guarded by the bourgeoise by cutting a few corners can quickly self-perpetuate as it grows—and as it does the consequences become dire. Recently, fake cryptocurrencies and such like may have simply been set up by savvy IT con artists to make a few quick bucks, but as more people get involved the snowball proves difficult for the Belfords to stop as Azoff and a hundred other shady characters just like him keep pushing it downhill until it hits society at large like an avalanche.
In short, Azoff encapsulates so much about the financial times that it’s easy to miss it all as you giggle at him jerking off. Thus, people may have had problems with The Wolf of Wall Street because of the way it seemed to glamourise tax-evading cash grabs and sexist bullshittery but such is life. One shot, in particular, showed a beleaguered FBI agent trundling to his crumby office on a stinking train while Belford reels of spiel about how he’s rich so jail will be a cakewalk.
Steve Coogan was outraged by this, calling for Scorsese to offer up some condemnation of Belford at this moment. But isn’t that how it is? The unjust rich continue to get away with murder while the virtuous go unrewarded and the grind continues forevermore. Only one top banker went to jail for their part in the financial crisis (Kareem Serageldin), but countless agents, journalists, and other investigators pulled their hair out. And for what? For a billionaire like Trump to be anointment president a decade on from the financial crash?
Scorsese’s scene subtly illuminates that with more veracity than any self-serving, virtuous condemnation would. After all, we should know Belfort is a bastard without Scorsese having to say it directly. We should be angered by the FBI agent sitting on a crumby train while crooks who crashed the economy serve a few months in private cells.
This is how Scorsese tells his tales of American life. They are endemic fables that highlight how things come to pass from the inside: How a taxi driver in a crumbling city ends up a mohawked martyr, how a champion boxer ends up bruised and beaten in old age angst, how fame hungry comedians lose touch with reality, how Azoff rose to the top spending more time with cocaine than a calculator. It is up to you to register these fellows on your moral compass. They’re just films, after all. Even with the true stories, if you fall into the trap of their entertaining surface then maybe that is just how it goes. Maybe the superficial charm of Azoff was as blinding as his teeth.
