(USA, 179 min.)
Dir. Martin Scorsese, Writ. Terence Winter
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Rob
Reiner, Kyle Chandler, Matthew McConaughey, Cristin Milioti, Jean Dujardin
The Wolf of Wall
Street thrusts Martin Scorsese balls deep into the squealing hog of
American capitalism. Scorsese doesn’t paint a pretty picture of the land of the
free and wealthy, but this adaptation of Jordan Belfort’s riotously
entertaining memoir is a gloriously debauched satire. Belfort is brought to
life by Leonardo DiCaprio, who gives one of his better performances as the sly
stockbroker steals from the rich and throws sexier parties than Jay Gatsby ever
dreamed of. The Belfort of Scorsese’s film grabs the green light by the balls
and makes the American Dream look like a Greek Tragedy. (Any film that begins
with its protagonist ingesting cocaine from a prostitute’s vagina is bound to
be a complete gong show.) The film should by all regards overdose on all of its
sinful behaviour, yet Scorsese and company mix a cocktail that is so bat-shit
crazy that it does the trick and stays remarkably lucid for all 179 minutes of
its rambunctious running time.
Jordan Belfort gaily recounts in The Wolf of Wall Street about his rise and fall as a cutthroat
stockbroker. The year was 1987 when he first became a certified broker—the year
in which Gordon Gekko told Americans that greed was good. Jordan, not
necessarily inspired by Michael Douglas’s slick-haired slimeball but obviously
a kindred spirit, stepped off the bus a young idealist and left his first day
of work infected by the poisonous money-high of trading stocks. His boss, Mark
Hanna (Matthew McConaughey, who swells a cameo with outstanding gusto), offers
the earnest Jordon three words of sound advice over liquid lunch that shape him
for the years to come: “cocaine and hookers.”
Cocaine and hookers are Jordan’s food and fuel indeed. As The Wolf of Wall Street whizzes through
the first few years of Jordan’s career, his success skyrockets by trading penny
stocks and earning the whopping fifty-percent commission they entail. His
business booms as he snorts some lines and taps some titties, enlisting
unqualified college friends in a fraternal brokerage house where the salesman
are given a script and rewarded ten-fold with all the lewd riches one can
imagine. DiCaprio delivers one speech after another that make Wall Street greed
look desperately ravenous. He amps the energy as high as it can go during these
Shakespearean orations—one almost expects Jordan to collapse like Howard Beale
does after appealing to the masses.
Jordan’s stock rises and he becomes living proof that nice
guys do indeed finish last. He cheats the system and winds up filthy rich. He
has a smoking hot wife—the first one, played by Cristin Milioti, had to go once
he got a taste of high society—named Naomi, who is known to Jordan by the
lovely pet name of The Duchess of Bay Ridge. Margot Robbie plays the tricky
role of The Duchess of Bay Ridge with smoldering spirit. It’s a true screen
breakthrough, for not only does the audible gasp from the males in the audience
suggest a star is born in The Wolf of
Wall Street, but Robbie’s ability to play the foil to DiCaprio’s badass
pretty boy is remarkable since Naomi never seems like the spoiled rich bitch
she could have been. Robbie is the Skyler White to DiCaprio’s Walter White. She’s
also the perfect embodiment for America’s upper crust that is keen to take a
bite of capitalism’s savoury pie and doomed to gag if it learns the recipe that
makes the pie so tasty.
The manic energy of the performances, coupled with the
cracked-out editing job by Thelma Schoonmaker and the film’s obnoxiously loud
soundtrack, could easily lead one to dismiss
The Wolf of Wall Street with a few
keystrokes as quickly as Jordon writes off
a thirty thousand dollar lunch and several business expenses to high class
hookers. (A boisterous encounter between Jordan and his father (Rob Reiner) is
a laugh-a-minute highlight.) The energy of The
Wolf of Wall Street evokes comparison to a keg-fuelled brodown, and the
film has more fucking expletives than Pulp
Fiction and enough nude lady parts to make the girls of Blue is the Warmest Color blush. There’s no mistaking, though, that
Scorsese and company pile on the R-rated fun to show the pervasive ugliness
that underlies America’s money machine.
The Wolf of Wall
Street is a full-on indictment of the broken system for which Belfort is
the unrepentant champion. It’s a scary portrait that refashions Belfort’s story
for the neoliberal post-Occupy America. The common folk have stepped up and
been squashed down by the Big Bad Wolves with the bigger wallets, and The Wolf of Wall Street disembowels the
players that win big in a world of unwavering self-indulgent profiteering.
Jordan’s direct-address to the camera, which offers a nice nod of
self-awareness to the film’s literary origins, offers some of the rare moments
of lucidity for the mechanics of his success story.
Jordan, see, is always high. “Cocaine and hookers,” indeed,
as Jordan and his partner-in-crime Donny Azoff (Jonah Hill, who gives his best
performance to date) spend much of the film on lethal doses of blow, morphine
and, most memorably, Quaaludes. The irony of Jordan’s sunny commentary is that
the machine of American capitalism is run by a bunch of brokers who are too
coked out of their minds to comprehend the consequences of their actions. Life
is one big high, punctuated by the ring of the trading bell to mark a victory
lap of sordid behaviour as the reward for a hard day’s work moving the money
from another person’s bank account to one’s own.
The adaptation by Terence Winter (“The Sopranos”) takes
significant liberties with Belfort’s memoir to deliver such a darkly funny
satire. Belfort’s written story tells of a stockbroker who made it big by
bending the rules, but was ultimately caught with his hand in the proverbial
cookie jar and then redeemed himself by getting sober and prioritizing his
family. The Jordan Belfort of the movie, on the other hand, is a repulsively
self-serving douchebag who refuses to walk away when the going gets rough. He
sells out every one of his closest conspirators to save his own ass, and
DiCaprio plays the smugness of Belfort’s actions with juicy relish. The tones of the two Wolf of Wall Streets is unmistakable: the book takes pride in its rags-to-riches tale while the film looks back with disgust on the Wolf's twisted game of supply and demand. The
disparity between the film and its source text is so impeccably glaring that The Wolf of Wall Street’s gonzo
dramatization of Belfort’s story refashions the truth anew to show it for how
disgusting it really is.
Scorsese sums up the sad truth that guys like Belfort win
while nice guys finish last by ending The
Wolf of Wall Street with a cynical juxtaposition between Jordan and the FBI
agent, played by Kyle Chandler, who pursues Jordan throughout the film. It’s a
quick montage that plays like a shot-reverse shot and echoes a quibble the two
men have when first they butt heads on Jordan’s yacht. The agent, sitting alone
and sweating his balls off on the subway, realizes that his punishment for
making an honest living is to spend more minutes riding public transit during
his lifetime than Belfort does sitting behind bars during the sentence for his shameless
crimes.
The Wolf of Wall
Street furthers the lament for the sucker by closing on an infomercial
video for Jordan’s latest endeavor as a Get Rich Quick guru. He delivers a captivating
speech that asks the masses to sell him a pen that he removes from his pocket
and passes to them. It’s a simple task that even a lowly pot dealer can do, yet
the audience of wide-eyed fools clings to Jordan in anticipation of his advice
on fast money. Scorsese pans across the gawking audience and lets the masses
share the blame for Jordan’s crime, for as long as naïve Little Red Riding
Hoods will offer up their picnic baskets, the Big Bad Wolf will gobble them up.
Rating: ★★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
The Wolf of Wall Street is now playing in wide release.
