Wake up, you merry people of the world, you! Wake up and rejoice. The Goodfellas of our time has arrived, in all its vainglory. And it's the kind of film your mother warned you about.
Oh, Mr. Scorsese, where have you been all this while? Where was this sneaky potshot at the pop-culture of the '90s like you promised with Casino and Goodfellas for so long? Never mind, sir, never mind.
As always, it's a pleasure to witness a brilliant filmmaker spin out of control and crank out a transgressive piece of cinema so exhausting that you know that you now have a new milestone movie to scale. And before I even completed my viewing of The Wolf Of Wall Street, I knew I'm going to have to come back to it soon enough. Because there is so much going on, so much you have to watch, assess and enjoy that a single viewing can't do justice to it. It's ridiculously dynamite, like Scorsese, aged seventy-one, mind you, wanted to live out his wildest dreams on screen. They animate like arresting fireworks in the sky, try tearing your eyes away, pal.
Crass, it's not. For the past one month or so, ever since a few lucky clods got their tickets to paid previews, I've been hearing that Scorsese's new film was excessively vulgar. They walk out, shooting mouths and pointing fingers at the master filmmaker like he's done something taboo. Yes, I'm here to affirm that The Wolf Of Wall Street is indeed shockingly vulgar and darkly funny, so much so that it makes Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat Sagdiyev seem like a saint. But, hey, we aren't forgetting what we are watching, are we? The material that served as the film's inspiration is Jordan Belfort's own memoir about his doings as a stockbroker in the good ol' 1990s. This is just a wily adaptation of the book. What's the big deal, fellas? It's not like he's preaching the kind of lifestyle that Belfort led, he's just studying it. Like we are.
I brought in the weekend before last by reading the final draft of the script I found on some website. It gave me an equivocal idea about what I was in for, with all that witty dialogue peppered with tumultuous sex, nudity and drugs, and that cocky little git that DiCaprio played magnificently was written so well that it awed me. Belfort is an obnoxious man, a sickening voyeur to hoot, to hang out with, to talk with, a conceited bighead who did something shamelessly nefarious like making millions of dollars through large-scale securities fraud and blowing it all up to satiate his drug-addiction. And yet, and yet, he's complete fun. He's reckless, he's stupid and he's funny. I haven't met anyone quite like him, certainly not in the recent spew of films and DiCaprio has never been more ebullient. He's Calvin Candie, only amped-up to several more degrees. And he comes with an swagger to match Scorsese's.
Probably the best thing about The Wolf Of Wall Street is that it doesn't preach. You don't get to hear sermons about what's right and what's wrong, but you're watching something that tells you it's bad. Belfort's drug-fueled antics first amuse you, then disgust you. You're left to figure it out yourself, nobody tells you that. That's Scorsese's genius. He takes a look at the crimes of Wall Street in the '90s through the villain's POV but while you're having a blast like him, you're also shocked by his actions. Like him.
While flipping through Terence Winter's beautifully-written script, one scene stayed with me for a long time after I had finished it. That's a lunch scene between Belfort and Mark Hanna, his boss played by a spectacularly scrupulous Matthew McConaughey, who's goading his avaricious appetite. He slips a cheeky $100 note to the waiter and instructs him to get him drinks every five minutes till he passes out. He teaches Belfort how to make it big by plummeting stocks while high on alcohol and drugs, a character so different from the one he played in Mud. McConaughey deserves an Oscar nomination for this two-bit role, the ten best minutes of the movie by miles, I think. Belfort walks and talks like no one I've met, and when Hanna's company gets wrecked, he talks a geeky Donnie Azoff into joining him. Azoff is impressed by Belfort driving a Jaguar, scoffs when Belfort tells him about the money stockbrokers make and is incredulous when Belfort pops up a check to prove it. And from then on, the ride's one hell of an explosion.
I've never been a fan of films based on Wall Street, I'll tell you straight out. Yeah, I really liked what Oliver Stone did with it, or what J. C. Chandor did in Margin Call with those intelligent colloquies about the global economic crisis and whatnot. I've never really understood the stock game, those are spiteful, wishy-washy things that don't get to me at all. I don't understand what the hell were these guys talking about, all those damn schemes they sold and screamed on the phone while doing drugs at the same time, but I understood what Scorsese and Winter wanted me to understand - they were making a lot of money and none of it was licit. Like Belfort's character sneers bumptiously at one point, none of the audience was expected to understand any of it. It wasn't about how they did it, it was about why they did it. Alright, fair enough.
For three hours, the kind of gross-out depravation that unfolded on the screen sickened me. I didn't find it funny at all, not when I'm watching an abhorrent man scourge and swindle a man into financing his junkets. Or a woman getting manhandled in a drug-induced haze. It wasn't meant to be funny, it was meant to be scary. Point duly noted? You can't wag your damn finger at the film and inculpate it for glorifying drugs and money. Or being sexist. The point is, if this kind of a lifestyle amazes you, seduces you, you're greedy. You're sexist. You're halfwitted. The movie is not.
If The Wolf Of Wall Street is an example of something, it's why Leonardo DiCaprio warrants an Oscar the Academy has owed him for over a decade. He's terrifically wild, perilously peppy and delivers his line, one after one, to comic perfection. In one scene later on in the film, he tries to make his way home from a club, dangerously stoned and delirious, gets there, watches Popeye eating a can of spinach and overdoses on drugs again to save a choking Azoff. It's pretty damn spooky, and it's a definite call to the Academy why he is a definite frontrunner for the gold this year.
The casting, as always in a Scorsese film, is flawless. Jonah Hill is fantastic, as are Rob Reiner and Kyle Chandler, who plays what he has been playing for the past two years. Reiner's aptly cast, much to my surprise, and he does well. Really well. Margot Robbie, as Belfort's wife, is impressive. She's got the looks and she's got the confidence. Good job handling the quivering pressure that came with the role. Jean Dujardin, who was sensational in The Artist, doesn't have much to do here but whatever little he has, he does alright.
The Wolf Of Wall Street is picky - and we ought to owe it to cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto's magical camera that captures the rousing drama - and I believe it's still way ahead of its time. In the generations to come, this would be the one movie Scorsese would be remembered for, a riveting piece of cinema from the master filmmaker. Scorsese's cinema has never been more alive and it's heartening to see the filmmaker indulging into this kind of exuberance. You won't believe a seventy-one year old has made this kind of a film, it's more like a twenty year-old made it. Dazzling.
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