Scorsese mounts the filthy, piggish behavior on such a grand scale that mere moral disapproval might seem squeamish, unimaginative, frightened.
The film, as you can see, is a bit of a trap for critics. To adopt the idiom and the tone of the movie: Are you fucking kidding me? Are you telling me that you’re bored by big money? By orgies? By monster yachts? Are you saying you don’t like looking at beautiful naked blondes? Is that what you’re fucking telling me? Three hours of that kind of hectoring. I didn’t much care for “Wolf,” but every time I describe it to someone he says, “I want to see that!” Many people are going to be made happy by the wild, hyper-vulgar exuberance, the endless cruddy behavior (swindling, drugs, whoring, orgies, dwarf-tossing, more swindling), and the fully staged excess of every kind. Put crudely, this is his attempt to out-Tarantino Tarantino. But the entire movie feels manic and forced, as though Scorsese is straining to make the craziest, most over-the-top picture ever-as if he is determined, at seventy-one, to outdo his earlier triumphs, “Raging Bull” and “GoodFellas,” and to show that he’s still the king. Leonardo DiCaprio puts his voice, his body, and his handsome face, which he contorts into a grimace, into what is certainly his largest performance yet. “Wolf” has great, giddy moments, and Terence Winter (“Boardwalk Empire”), who did the adaptation, creates flurries of raucously cynical dialogue that hit you like a rapid series of jabs. (Rodrigo Prieto is the cinematographer.) The camera plunges into groups of stockbrokers, cleaving their numbers as Moses did the Red Sea it swings over them and then swings back, like some video-enhanced boomerang.
Scorsese employs a flexible narrative form and a free-swinging style of filming. Set in the period from the mid-eighties to the aughts, it’s a three-hour-long satire of loathsome financial activity and extravagant debauchery, and it’s meant to epitomize everything that has gone wrong with money culture. The movie is based on a memoir of the same title, by the Wall Street scoundrel Jordan Belfort, who cheated his clients out of tens of millions of dollars, ratted on his friends, and was indicted and jailed for securities fraud and money-laundering. Opinions about Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” will be-how can I put it gently?-volatile.
0 kommentar(er)
