Everything about this film, in fact, is an overblown version of the restrained and savvy Boiler Room which was actually made in the 90s rather than simply a gaudy pastiche of it.īut the film completely shifts gears when Jonah Hill’s sidekick character arrives. The film starts like your average pacey biopic with a young Jordan (Leonardo DiCaprio) cutting his teeth at a big Wall Street firm, with Matthew McConaughey, who has been really nailing the creepy roles lately, giving the obligatory Gordon Gekko/Ben Affleck “greed is good” pep talk.
But while Mean Streets and the early work had some feeling of grit and gravity to them, Scorsese seems to have pitched the tone of Wolf somewhere between Animal House and Caligula, except with more nudity than both combined. This is of course no big shock coming from the man that has been turning gangsters, murderers and psychopaths into wise-cracking cultural icons for 30-odd years. don’t so much walk this line as chop it up and snort it off a stripper’s tits. Walking the line between these two options is a difficult task. There needs to be some sympathy with the anti-hero to carry the audience through, but not so much that we’re rooting for them. On the other hand there are joyless, moralising films like Blow, which shatter the illusions of the criminal lifestyle so brutally that it might as well be a public service announcement.
So herein lies a problem which seems to keep filmmakers and cultural critics alike up at night: how do you depict bad behaviour without somehow validating it in the process? On one hand you have films like Scarface which are so unapologetically gratuitous that they can inspire a generation of petty criminals. Perhaps his greatest con is eliciting a sympathetic portrayal in a major Hollywood picture. But he also, according to the daughter of one of his inner circle, who wrote an op ed in LA Weekly, destroyed countless lives (many of them pensioners) before selling out many of his closest associates, ratting on them to the FBI. He “robbed from the rich and gave to himself” as a Forbes journalist in the film puts it. Belfort was a lowly penny stock trader whose selling prowess allowed him to flog worthless investments to the super rich, and later run IPO scams.
Marin Scorsese’s latest offering, The Wolf of Wall Street has received quite a bit of flak for glamorising the escapades of its titular arsehole Jordan Belfort.
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