Review: Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf Of Wall Street" is a firecracker of a film that explodes slowly.

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.

Reminiscence: Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver" : The Choice Puts Me In A Pickle.

In 1973, a year after Francis Ford Coppola changed the game for gangster movies by making Brando place the head of Khartoum on Jack Woltz's kingsize bed, Scorsese was gearing up for his would-be breakthrough film. Mean Streets was certainly iconic in its perusal of street crime and its attempts to mould a gangster movie with words and not guns. Scorsese knew crime, you see; he was brought up in Little Italy, a place in New York City where, as he disclosed in the making of the film, a whole bar would tussle over nothing at all. Maybe if you said something in jest or you didn't get a drink on time, tempers flared up and every single guy in the bar would brawl until one capitulated. He fashioned these observations into Mean Streets, which starred a young Harvey Keitel and an even younger Robert De Niro.

Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets.

I watched Mean Streets a couple of years ago when I was sixteen or maybe seventeen. It remained incised in my mind ever since because I couldn't believe a modernistic movie like that was made in a time when family films were walking away with the Oscars. 'Course, Mean Streets was spurned at the Oscars because it was too small a movie, too low-budgeted. I mean, you won't want a layman winning an Oscar, would you? Well, as they found out in the next four decades, Scorsese wasn't just another filmmaker. Anyway, I loved the movie. The coarsish script was talky, layered with dense jargon and the execution was masterful. That was pretty unexpected since I was under the daffy impression that we were dealing with a supposed amateur here. Keitel nailed his role, kept the urgency at the apex with his terse exchanges with De Niro and walked away with a coolheaded performance. Skookum!

But De Niro was the revelation here. He was. Even in his salad days, he could put together a textured performance that showed sparks of promise of a future luminary. His was a more controlled performance, a character that he was seemingly familiar with and he played him accordingly. In his four decades as an actor, I'd probably single this one out as the most neglected. Second comes the one in Ronin.

So, I was watching Taxi Driver the other day on television, a rare instance when the channel operators choose a movie sagaciously and another one of my most cherished movies, I wondered why was Mean Streets the movie with the shit end of the stick. Yes, Taxi Driver was a landmark film for obvious reasons, maybe the most audacious of all movies, but it came four years after the ravishing Mean Streets which ushered in the heavily eye-browed master filmmaker in the first place. Taxi Driver was a gorgeous piece of cinema, I won't dispute that, but it couldn't match Mean Streets in terms of style. Mean Streets was a ballad, an ode to the movies that young Scorsese saw as a boy. The soundtrack, a stockpile of old American classics, complemented the images smoothly. And it did what it did with such finesse that you're captivated from the moment it begins. 

Conversely, Taxi Driver was more of a character study. A demented man falters in his romantic life and he avenges this humiliation on the world that he sees as merciless. He meets loonies like him who fuel the rage inside him. And, in the end, it all comes forth. He goes bananas all over New York City. Scorsese isn't new to characters who work like a ticking bomb about to go off. He strayed in those waters later with Raging Bull, Cape Fear and even Goodfellas up to a certain point. But Taxi Driver was his most fearless coup, a 'man against the world' story that gave an insight into the mind of a wacko. In those times, movies like that were hard to come by. No wonder legendary film critic Roger Ebert instantly affirmed it as one of the greatest he had ever seen. Hell, here I am, all of twenty, four decades later and it's one of the best movies I've ever seen.

Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.

But when it comes to judging between the two, I'm iffy. Sure, go on, point your stubby little finger at Taxi Driver and chide me for not seeing the obvious choice. But when I think about it, and I mean really think about it, I ask myself - what would Scorsese have done if he had got a healthier budget on Mean Streets? What would that movie have been like? Hey, to all you twits who doubt it, remember - Scorsese made Goodfellas on a bigger budget so I wouldn't necessarily maul the idea. He can work both ways, you know. He made After Hours on a scant one and The Departed two decades later on a pricey one.

So, I'm trying to gauge what I want to say. It's a known fact that Scorsese has made a landmark movie in every decade he has worked in, like Jack Nicholson who is the other bigwig of the honor. But a lot of folks believe that Taxi Driver should walk away with the glory. I'm going for Mean Streets. I treasure those films that can whip up a ravishing experience on modest production and Mean Streets fits the bill perfectly. It gave us a gangster movie with minimal violence and a lot of smarts. A generation later, on a better production, crime movies don't match the panache of it.

Mean Streets is as close as you'll ever come to knowing a gangster in New York City and still be aware that it's just a movie. That's genius, you know.