The Wolf of Wall Street movie review (2014) | Little White Lies

The Wolf of Wall Street

16 Jan 2014 / Released: 17 Jan 2014

Man in suit giving speech at podium
Man in suit giving speech at podium
3

Anticipation.

Late period Scorsese is never a sure bet, and advanced word seemed muted.

4

Enjoyment.

Scorsese’s most thoroughly entertaining film in years makes its 179-minute running time fly by.

5

In Retrospect.

More than simple fun, this is perhaps the best Scorsese film since Goodfellas.

A late-career dirty bomb from Mar­tin Scors­ese in this licen­tious and hilar­i­ous essay on greed and excess.

When at last the vigour of their youth has been exhaust­ed, drained and sup­plant­ed by either the wis­dom or senil­i­ty of old age, the cinema’s enfee­bled vet­er­ans are most often strand­ed in drea­ry anti­qua­tion, slow­ly set­tling in to matu­ri­ty and the pur­ga­to­ry of their so-called late peri­od’. Kazuo Ishig­uro once said that a novelist’s career ought to be thought of in terms of the length and tim­ing of a footballer’s career”, but film­mak­ers are rarely fatigued so quick­ly — even our wea­ri­est nona­ge­nar­i­ans still muster a fea­ture now and again, pot­ter­ing about movie sets with an air of mel­low sophistication.

And what plea­sures do such efforts typ­i­cal­ly yield? Well, when we speak of late peri­od films, we gen­er­al­ly mean those whose man­ner tends toward the mea­sured and the urbane, those whose sen­si­bil­i­ty reflects the calm and refine­ment of the ven­er­a­bly aged — films in the plain­tive reg­is­ter of Hayao Miyazaki’s moony, lan­guid swan song The Wind Ris­es, to cite but one recent exam­ple. Such films quake and buck­le beneath the weight of their artist’s his­to­ry. If they seem lead­en it is because they are heavy with the past.

But there is anoth­er, less com­mon vari­ety of late peri­od film, those which in their vital­i­ty and esprit defy the age­ing of their mak­er — films whose his­to­ry is either digest­ed or divest­ed, purged of its unwieldy weight, pre­fer­ring instead to sprint light­ly toward the new. The Wolf of Wall Street is one such film — per­haps even the such film: a nim­ble, impos­si­bly jocund thing, it throbs and pul­sates with life, eager to sop up the world’s gen­er­ous excess. This is a film of extra­or­di­nary jeju­ni­ty; its man­ner is rau­cous, spright­ly, unhinged. It bar­rels through its 179-minute run­ning time, spend­ing scarce­ly a moment in repose, sprint­ing there and back with­out any need for breath or pause.

The sto­ry is almost clas­si­cal­ly trag­ic — based on for­mer mil­lion­aire Jor­dan Belfort’s mem­oirs of the same name, it’s yet anoth­er film about the cor­rup­tion of the Amer­i­can Dream, play­ing out as if it were the Scar­face of stock­broking — and yet the tone has been ren­dered unre­lent­ing­ly com­ic, almost fan­tas­tic, mak­ing this an epic of the light­est touch. Mar­tin Scors­ese is 71 years old. Based on The Wolf of Wall Street, he might as well be 25. The late peri­od has nev­er seemed quite so young.

Cer­tain­ly Hugo didn’t sug­gest Scors­ese had any­thing so ver­nal left in him — though it was of course very accom­plished and deeply felt, the film was about as fusty and old-fash­ioned as they come. Hugo seemed in some ways like a ges­ture of def­er­ence to pos­ter­i­ty, as if toward the end of his career he felt com­pelled to nail down his love let­ter to the movies for the sake of the his­tor­i­cal record. And, with this respect­ful ode to cinema’s fore­bears out of the way — and, I think not insignif­i­cant­ly, with his long-await­ed Acad­e­my Award for Best Direc­tor already safe­ly tucked away — Scors­ese has been duly lib­er­at­ed at last from the implied oblig­a­tions of pres­tige, free­ing him to lose him­self in unbri­dled (and, in this case, appar­ent­ly rather prodi­gal) per­son­al expression.

The result is some­thing con­sid­er­ably clos­er, in both spir­it and tem­pera­ment, to his minor efforts’ of the 1980s, in par­tic­u­lar the man­ic plea­sures of After Hours and espe­cial­ly The King of Com­e­dy — two osten­si­bly friv­o­lous films whose rep­u­ta­tions suf­fered unfair­ly in com­par­i­son to more seri­ous endeav­ours like Good­fel­las and Rag­ing Bull, a fate which may well befall Wolf in turn.

Well, it seems that between After Hours, The King of Com­e­dy and The Wolf of Wall Street, Scors­ese has proven him­self as much a mas­ter of com­e­dy as, say, crime dra­ma or the mafia pic­ture, and per­haps it’s time we begin to reeval­u­ate this dimen­sion of his style. While Wolf is indeed a sprawl­ing, stag­ger­ing work, grap­pling with con­tem­po­rary anx­i­eties and the mod­ern con­di­tion with intel­li­gence and matu­ri­ty, the first qual­i­ty for which it ought to be praised is its humour. Its excel­lence in oth­er areas aside, this is plain­ly among the fun­ni­est films of the year — rib­ald, riotous, ridiculous.

Much of this, nat­u­ral­ly, has been drawn lib­er­al­ly (and unques­tion­ing­ly) from the source material’s stu­pe­fy­ing non­fic­tion: Belfort’s stratos­pher­ic ascen­den­cy from pen­ny-stock shuck­ster to prof­li­gate bil­lion­aire is not with­out its share of inher­ent luna­cy, and Scors­ese is more than hap­py to fur­nish this tale with the indul­gences only a $100 mil­lion farce could afford. Wolf is thus a film of gild­ed offices and pala­tial man­sions, of unholy afflu­ence rel­ished with glee, a work of such eye-pop­ping opu­lence that its every frame dou­bles as lux­u­ry porn.

And that, of course, is pre­cise­ly the point: the film isn’t about the social cor­rup­tion which per­mits men like Belfort to thrive so much as our cul­tur­al need to see and enjoy them do it — so it only makes sense that his jour­ney grat­i­fies vic­ar­i­ous­ly. When he brags, ear­ly on, that he deserves the mon­ey he swin­dles because he knows how to spend it bet­ter”, you get the impres­sion that the same could be said of Scors­ese: only a man who’s lived the high life could so thor­ough­ly con­ceive of its cel­e­bra­to­ry depiction.

Part of the joy of The Wolf of Wall Street the can­dour with which it address­es its subject’s flim­sy charm and charis​ma​.It nev­er stoops to the wrist-slap­ping of sim­plis­tic cas­ti­ga­tion: this isn’t intend­ed to be a damn­ing por­trait of an immoral man. The point is not to prove that Jor­dan Belfort is a bad per­son. Rather, he is an amoral one: a man so removed from ques­tions of mean­ing and pur­pose that the pur­suit and process of mak­ing mon­ey eclipses the why and what for. It’s impor­tant that we’re nev­er shown whose mon­ey Belfort is steal­ing. We’re just shown that he spends it better.

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