In one momentarily moving third-act speech, Belfort tells us that fellow financier Kimmie Belzer was "one of the first brokers here, one of Stratton's original 20". With a couple of notable exceptions, the women here are all wives, girlfriends and sex-workers. Depressing, too, that while endless full-frontal nudity is required of the women, the only penis on display is fleeting, flaccid and comically fake.īelfort may be a chauvinist ass, but that's no reason for Scorsese to follow suit. For all its avowed "adult" aesthetic, there's something leeringly adolescent about the endless displays of pulchritudinous flesh, the orgies in particular looking like outtakes from some over-glossed 90s erotic thriller with auteurist affectations. It doesn't help that the bacchanalian scenes are conjured in tones that recall the naffest interludes of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. Margot Robbie as DiCaprio’s wife, a role ‘more Sharon Stone than Lorraine Bracco’.
The wolf of wall street reddit discussion movie#
As for The Wolf of Wall Street, you wind up realising that there's a very good reason why no classic movie ever opened with the words: "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a stockbroker… " For all his motivational Gordon Gekko speeches and beamingly boisterous bonhomie, Belfort remains as impenetrably alienating as the human impersonator at the heart of Cronenberg's ice-cold Cosmopolis, a studiedly austere arthouse endeavour that was at least intentionally boring – sort of. Rather, it's a problem with the subject, whose reptilian repugnance and vacuum-sealed amorality Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter fail to crack. This is not a criticism of DiCaprio, whose full-throttle performance is both tightly nuanced and insanely OTT. While The Wolf of Wall Street slavishly apes the style and structure of Goodfellas, the dramatic magnetism that made Ray Liotta's Henry Hill so watchable is sorely absent. Yet having now seen the film twice, I can attest that it made me not love but utterly loathe Belfort – a moral victory, perhaps, but also something of a problem, because a character who is simply detestable rapidly becomes uninteresting.
Certainly, Belfort himself appears thrilled to have been portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, who beat Brad Pitt to the lucrative book rights several years ago, rights from which Belfort insists: "I am not making a single dime." Hmm. Since opening to mixed reactions in the US (one cinema refused refunds to outraged patrons on the grounds that "Mr Scorsese is an auteur and his work is rated brilliant by critics and academic bastions of thought"), this exhausting movie has been charged with revelling in, rather than explicitly judging, the obscene lifestyle it depicts. All this debauchery we view from the smugly narrated POV of the "self-made man" himself, while the victims of his "pump and dump" schemes, many of them ordinary working-class folk ("postmen, always postmen"), remain as absent from the screen as they were from Belfort's venal mind. En route, he sets up the notorious Stratton Oakmont brokerage firm (the inspiration for the 2000 film Boiler Room), organises dwarf-throwing parties (the real-life Belfort denies that little people were ever thrown), consumes his own body weight in Quaaludes, blows coke up a hooker's butt and has a candle shoved up his own by someone called Venice. Based on the self-aggrandising memoirs of convicted stock market trader Jordan Belfort, this three-hour orgy of greed, indulgence and swearing (more than 500 "fucks" – a screen record for a drama) follows its antihero's over-powdered nose as he snorts his way from small-town fraudster to big-time crook. Yet watching the familiar elements (money, madness, women, swindling etc) I felt a certain empathy with Hall's sniffy reaction to the movie he saw "decorating the Rialto screen" all those years ago. There's no direct connection between Rowland V Lee's black-and-white drama and Martin Scorsese's black comedy (a very broad term) with which it shares its name. Money there is, also madness, women and swindling. In 1929 the New York Times's "motion picture critic" Mordaunt Hall opined: " The Wolf of Wall Street is a talking feature that causes one to sigh… This yarn is not materially different from other Wall Street tales that have come to the screen.
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