Every movie we see #4: The Wolf of Wall Street, WOWS for short
How compelling is Martin Scorsese’s latest film The Wolf of Wall Street? We opinionated, slightly mouthy people (pilosopo) went to see it—and it shut us up. (Also there was a pretty good audience for a weekday afternoon and we couldn’t really talk.)
The Wolf of Wall Street—not for nothing is its acronym WOWS—is so big, loud and outrageous, we can imagine Scorsese telling DiCaprio: “Leo, I saw The Great Gatsby. You were good, but the movie…too subtle. Too small.” The Wolf of Wall Street could be a re-imagining of The Great Gatsby, if Daisy Buchanan were a stash of Quaaludes.
It’s supposed to be a biopic of Jordan Belfort, the stock-swindling, money-laundering, securities-defrauding, mega-whoring scam artist whose crimes had inspired an earlier movie, The Boiler Room. A huge subject for sure, given the protagonist’s legendary excesses and mass consumption of drugs, but too small for Scorsese’s purposes.
Marty—we’re presumptuous—is in an odd position: he has to out-Scorsese all his cinematic spawn, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino and David O. Russell (whose American Hustle is practically Goodfellas). So instead of telling the tale of one criminal, he makes a satire about a land of opportunity, where you can be anything you want to be if you have the stones and an On/Off switch on your scruples, and where making money is the religion, as we are reminded every time Belfort addresses his troop of stockbrokers like an old-time preacher. “Stratton Oakmont (Belfort’s company) is America,” he declares. You can’t get much clearer than that.
No wonder Wolf was placed in the Comedy or Musical category at a recent awards show. It’s wildly, hysterically funny, and its cast is in take no prisoners mode. Leonardo DiCaprio throws himself into the Belfort role—literally—and reveals unsuspected skills in physical comedy. He’s hilarious. His scenes with Jonah Hill as his cohort Donnie Azoff just blow up the screen. Watch for the bravura sequence involving quaaludes, a Ferrari, a telephone and some ham.
Matthew McConaughey appears early on as Belfort’s mentor Mark Hanna—when did he get this brilliant? We call him a talentless hack, and then he steals Magic Mike and delivers a series of excellent performances that might lead to one or two Oscars this year. Margot Robbie comes on very strong as the antihero’s wife, Jean Dujardin is the perfect sleazy Swiss lawyer, and Joanna Lumley holds the copyright on fabulous.
Working with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto and frequent music collaborator Robbie Robertson, Scorsese evokes the pumped-up, coke-addled, testosterone-fueled insanity of the boiler room where aspiring masters of the universe con regular people out of their hard-earned money. Later, they adopt the posh name and target rich people. As Hanna teaches Belfort, nobody knows why stocks rise and fall, the thing is to sell the hell out of them.
This is a movie that makes the viewer ask, “Am I on drugs?” Belfort and his crew are high on drugs, sex and money, and when they come down they don’t have existential crises. That would require more depth than their three thousand dollar suits (in 90s prices) can contain.
It’s impossible to watch Wolf and American Hustle and The Blue Jasmine without connecting them to the frauds, failures and abuses that broke the global economy. Why target the small operators like himself, Belfort asks FBI Special Agent Denham (the ever-reliable Kyle Chandler), when Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and other big players were collateralizing debts? Belfort is no good guy by any stretch of the imagination, but in a world where money rules, what’s illegal?
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
