If this review seems a little disordered let me admit that I'm not inclined to compose it with any more care than Scorsese did his movie, so if you're feeling shortchanged, write to Marty. Lemme fart the plot into your hand; broker-guy gets rich ripping off his fellow suburbanites with a B-Team of unlikely associates and together they launch into a typically Scorsese douche-o-rama with a side of lippy broads, free-flow blow and frantic materialism that inevitably sloughs into legal entanglement/inevitable philosophical take-home across the shallow arc of the central protagonist's adventures. Deep breath. Atypically, it is also a great big sloppy fucking mess of undercooked and overheated fail. Don't get me wrong; I enjoy and even respect most of Scorsese's work and wouldn't stick the boot in gratuitously. It's just that he's been on a downward slide for a few years now and I'm not cool with the critical bukkake that seems to be greasing the rails.
The Good: Hill's performance as Azoff, a creature infused with so many of the unblinkingly grotesque peculiarities exhibited by our species that it's little wonder he was ring-fenced and we were charged admission. I don't usually care for Hill's work and while this portrayal was greatly served by its adjacency to the charisma vacuum that is DiCaprio, it still deserves polite applause. The female leads were shrewdly-cast and well executed by both Milioti and Robbie, though I believe the latter adequate rather than stellar and don't really understand the hype around her portrayal of the dread Naomi. I enjoyed Chandler's FBI agent, and the notice paid to what must be the queasy surreality of extreme wealth. And I suppose... some of the observations around the Alice/Wonderland nature of conventional morality were accurate enough, if not earth-shattering.
But there's just too much bad and I could shovel that shit all day. The story is too familiar and all the more tiresome for circling DiCaprio, who seemed to me to embody a soulless porcine nadir somehow not germane to the material. Yes, Leo. Having scoured every inch of his performance in search of finesse, authority or even just plain old accidental mid-life competence, it proves as elusive as something rolled under a car seat at 2am. In fact he has killed stone dead everything Scorsese has fashioned around him. What is it about him that seems to capture the directorial imagination- is it a macho thing, the challenge of actually screwing a performance out of him? The only thing he convinced me of in three fucking hours was that he can ham the shit out of a 'lude hole and make like a sociopath on a big fucking boat. No props for that. I'd also be gratified if someone could explain the acclaim that greets McConaughey wherever he deigns to show his spooky face these days, because he too is as mediocre/faintly embarrassing as ever and I was utterly unmoved by his turn as senior coke weasel in the first act.
Visually, TWoWS looks cheap. I know the decade in question was infamously tacky (I was there), but looking over Scorsese's back catalogue supports my accusation. There's none of that sneaky underlying discipline that's always been so fundamental to the success of all those looser elements. The Wolf of Wall Street is achingly bereft of that monkey-grip on drama that was always the jewel in the crown. It just looks... uninspired, underproduced., and amid all that flabby overextension I'm still puzzling over whether the editing was culpable or heroic. Winter's free-form banter just flops onto the floor at our feet without the wheezy velour verité of Goodfellas or Casino, neither of which were penned by him and god, that is so horribly obvious. The voiceover just made me want to choke a bitch and I usually give that lazy shiz a pass.
Rendered down, TWoWS is just a shallow story about arseholes and I'm tired of arseholes. I'm sick of their greed, their shitty marriages, their retarded personal development; everything, basically. I get that they're supposed to make the world go round and I get that Martin's pointing us at the fact of their gumption and initiative like a dog directing our gaze to the last sausage on the plate, but it's not enough when we've been led to expect lasagne. So don't believe the hype. The Wolf of Wall Street shouldn't be award-bait and it's not even particularly good. I sincerely hope Scorsese pulls finger some time soon.
Rendered down, TWoWS is just a shallow story about arseholes and I'm tired of arseholes. I'm sick of their greed, their shitty marriages, their retarded personal development; everything, basically. I get that they're supposed to make the world go round and I get that Martin's pointing us at the fact of their gumption and initiative like a dog directing our gaze to the last sausage on the plate, but it's not enough when we've been led to expect lasagne. So don't believe the hype. The Wolf of Wall Street shouldn't be award-bait and it's not even particularly good. I sincerely hope Scorsese pulls finger some time soon.
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