Movie review: Scorcese's ‘Wolf of Wall Street' overdone
The FBI has a word to describe "The Wolf of Wall Street," Martin Scorsese's overamped, overdone, over-everything take on unscrupulous brokers and their standard and poor behavior. It's "Grenada," as in it's a no-win situation. Like the overmatched islanders futilely trying to fend off a massive invasion of U.S. troops in 1983, "The Wolf of Wall Street" is trampled by excess. And all you can do is sit back in shock as Scorsese goes down flailing to an embarrassing defeat.
Soaring off the success of "Hugo," the highest-grossing movie of his illustrious career, Scorsese obviously felt he could do no wrong in bringing Terence Winter's fact-based take on Wall Street hedonist Jordan Belfort to the screen. So he empties the filmmaking canons of common sense and adopts an anything-goes mentality of turning the amps up to 11 and letting the mountains of coke and skanky hookers fall where they may.
Some have compared "Wolf" to "Goodfellas," but those folks are obviously snorting the same substance Leonardo DiCaprio is as Belfort, the sex-, drug-, cash-addicted brokerage owner whom Forbes accurately termed a modern-day Robin Hood because he steals from the rich and gives to himself. He also regularly cheats on both his wives, ignores his kids and freely fosters a Caligula complex. He's the very definition of a selfish, boorish jerk, even more so when he smugly accepts a piddly 22-month sentence for his dozens of crimes, including fraud, money laundering and bilking thousands of innocent clients out of billions.
But what about the victims and the many lives his company's debauchery ruined? Scorsese doesn't care. He loves the scumbag, painting him in a purely positive light for most of the film's outrageous 177-minute runtime. Your butt feels every grueling second of it, as Scorsese repeats the same two or three scenes over and over without ever allowing an editor to say "when."
Even more grating is its over-reliance on DiCaprio's never-ending narration, which only adds to the tedium of a movie that lazily tells its story via expository dialogue instead of the more challenging route of showing instead of telling. No wonder eight people walked out of the screening I attended. They were the smart ones. Everyone else absorbed a nonstop assault on the senses by a movie that's loud, repetitive and completely devoid of character development.
Scorsese has said he intended to satirize the degenerate behavior exhibited by Wall Street's biggest players. But you'd never know it by the way he laughs with, not at, Belfort. So what's the point? Does he really expect us to warm to this despicable human being? If so, DiCaprio, who at 39 is a decade too old to play Belfort, does his director no favors.
Free of nuance and modulation, DiCaprio's Belfort is little more than a live-action cartoon with zero personality and no sense of self. Like in a lot of his movies of late, DiCaprio is about as exciting as wax. Yet Scorsese keeps casting him to his own detriment in duds like "The Aviator," "Gangs of New York" and "Shutter Island." But none of those are in the same classlessness as the mangy "Wolf."
It begins promisingly with a high-gloss, pseudo TV ad for Belfort's Stratton Oakmont brokerage, where his band of merry, inebriated thieves work feverishly moving money from your pockets to theirs. And it only gets better when we flash back to just before the 1987 crash, when Belfort, then a 26-year-old newbie, is invited to a six-martini lunch by his boss, marvelously played by Matthew McConaughey. It's a virtuoso cameo largely improvised by McConaughey, who keeps you riveted for more than five minutes spilling success tips like frequent masturbation and primal screams, all guaranteed to make Belfort very rich. And they do to the tune of $49 million per year.
Then the crash hits, and Belfort is back where he began - broke. But this time he'll leave behind traditional Wall Street and go for something more profitable and less legal: penny stocks. They represent shares in companies too small for the NASDAQ, but intriguing enough to lure less-savvy investors who have no clue they're about to be taken to the cleaners.
Flanked by his righthand man, Donnie Azoff (a wasted Jonah Hill), the company's capital soars. And as it does, so does the debauched behavior of its staff, which, according to Belfort's unreliable memoir on which the film is based, included snorting mountains of cocaine, popping quaaludes and having intercourse on the desks with a steady stream of hookers supplied gratis by the boss.
Seeing the bevy of full-frontal nudes engaging in sex acts with Belfort and his brokers (the film just barely escaped the deadly NC-17) - using piles of money as a makeshift mattress - is admittedly shocking, but when Scorsese repeats it more than a dozen times without benefit of insight or a much-needed editor, the stuff gets old quickly. As does Leo, who pretty much spends the majority of the movie screaming and engaging in manic gyrations that serve no purpose other than to remind that the movie has no pulse. He clearly thinks he's acting cool and clever, but in reality, he's just boring.
It's no coincidence that the only times the film is the least bit compelling are when DiCaprio is forced to shut up, first by McConaughey's hilarious monologue in Act I, and then about two hours later when a dogged FBI agent - superbly played by Kyle Chandler - gets the better of Belfort while confronting the latter on the deck of his 700-foot yacht.
The remaining 165 minutes are filled with scene after scene of Belfort getting high, bedding hookers, fighting with his bimbo second wife, Naomi (an overmatched Margot Robbie, playing exactly the same role Jennifer Lawrence has in "American Hustle," but to much less effect), and giving dull motivational speeches aimed at keeping the troops pumped up as the feds close in.
Through it all, DiCaprio struggles to maintain a credible Brooklyn accent, at times sounding like he's reverting back to J. Edgar Hoover. It's a terrible performance that's shockingly earning praise from critics' groups, including the Hollywood Foreign Press, which gave him a Golden Globe nomination for best actor. A more telling assessment of "The Wolf's" rancidness can be seen in the fact that the movie earned zero nominations from the Screen Actors Guild. Nor does it deserve any.
What it does merit is scorn for the way it callously celebrates thievery and adultery and makes crude jokes about little people and victims of cerebral palsy. It's sick and disturbing in all the wrong ways, rendering this "Wolf" nothing but a dog.
THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (R for sequences of strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language throughout, and some violence.) Cast includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Matthew McConaughey and Kyle Chandler. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Grade: D