By Can We Talk About... is a series examining peculiar moments in pop culture: the outfits, music videos, film cameos or internet ephemera that need a little more unpacking
What makes for an iconic depiction of on-screen intoxication? While many performances rely on little more than slurred speech and floppy movements to convey being sloshed, the best are more subtle, capturing some flash of truth of what it's like to be in that state: Humphrey Bogart's forlorn bar slump in Casablanca; Good Will Hunting's cocksure cry of "how do you like them apples?"; Jack Nicholson's maniacal grin while sat at the bar in The Shining; or Richard E Grant's pink-eyed, lane-swerving driving in Withnail and I.
To which canon we can add Leonardo DiCaprio's note-perfect embodiment of bladdered in The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese's 2013 adaptation of the memoir by Jordan Belfort. DiCaprio, playing the vulpine stock broker, spends much of the film's three-hour run with a glass in his hand, either sipping, toasting or chucking them into the bushes in his front garden. And when he's not drinking, it's only because he's got a face full of pills and powders.
Granted, it's not quite so subtle as Bogie's lean, but Wolf's most enduring scene is DiCaprio's front-crawl across a driveway while out of his mind on Quaaludes, the incapacitating sedative. Despite not technically being drunk, there's something very drunken about DiCaprio's slack body movements and incoherent baying on the phone, which makes sense given the performance that inspired his own.
In a 2014 interview on stage at Santa Barbara Film Festival, DiCaprio gave credit to a YouTube clip of "the drunkest man in the world", explaining that he was taken not only by the fact "he was sort of elasticated", but also his motivation, which meant he "wouldn't stop reaching for something that was a life sustaining force for him."
Though the convenience store he drags himself across the floor of isn't alive with the vividness of a Scorsese film, and he's striving to reach a beer fridge, rather than a pearl white Lamborghini Countrach, there is the same bewildering contortion of limbs in both clips: the desperation of something that should be easy becoming impossible. It's a feeling that anyone who's attempted to send a text message describing where they are after six hours of drinking will understand.
DiCaprio's homage to this determined man is even more beautifully warped, his internal monologue delighted when he realises, faced with a flight of steps: "I can roll!". Funny drunk scenes often zoom in on how stupid we appear to the outside world; what's really funny is how much of a genius we are to ourselves when intoxicated.
When DiCaprio finally makes it to the car, he balletically thrusts one leg into the air, somehow managing to open the car door. After failing to enter feet-first he drags himself inside, the sight of his feet flapping in the air as he hollers down the phone, in the dimly lit driveway, like a scene from a Renaissance painting.
Bogart might have invoked Medieval literature's courtly love while ruminating on the concept of longing, but it feels fittingly of our times that for DiCaprio, the spark that ignited his swim across brickwork was one man's crusade for a six pack.
