The Wolf of Wall Street

What's wrong with Martin Scorsese's bloated, elephantine "Wolf of Wall Street" is epitomized in the movie's last scene. The hero, a crooked stock broker, has become a motivational speaker. In the final scene, he is teaching forty or fifty hapless-looking wannabe tycoons how to make sales in a Holiday Inn banquet hall in Auckland, New Zealand. He displays a pen and demands that a man seated in the first row sell him that pen. The man stammers and stutters and is embarassed. Scorsese is reprising a scene in the first half-hour of the movie, a gag about how to get someone to buy a pen and so the audience watching the movie knows the punch-line. Turning from the first poor fool, the hero shoves the pen in the face of the man seated next to him and demands that he sell him the pen. This guy also is baffled and stammers something completely witless. At this stage, the movie has made its point -- and, in fact, made it twice: most people don't know how to sell anything and a man who is a good salesman has certain advantages in the world. But the film goes on to have Leonardo DiCaprio, playing the disgraced "Wolf of Wall Street," push the pen into the hands of a third man and, once again, demand that he sell him the pen. This is the problem: we understand the rather simple and obvious point that the movie is making and, yet, Scorsese, and the screenwriter, Terrence Winter, keep hammering away, treating the audience as if we are as stupid as the marks that DiCaprio has been defrauding for our entertainment throughout the picture. It's the third iteration of this situation ("sell me the pen!") that exposes the movie's major problem -- it's three hours long but with plot insufficient to support a two hour running time, let alone this movie's epic length. The first iteration of the gag with the pen was sufficient and an alert viewer would understand what Scorsese intends by the scene; the second iteration can be chalked-up to Scorsese's Italian-American volubility, his tendency to say everything once and, then, repeat himself in a louder voice. But the third iteration is completely unnecessary, dull and, further, condescending -- it assumes that the audience has to have everything shown to them three times to grasp even elemental thematic aspects of the film. (This is part and parcel of the movie's condescending approach to the audience -- at this stage in his career, Scorsese must think that he audience for his films is comprised of idiots. Throughout the movie, DiCaprio talks to the camera and, on several occasions, says in an avuncular tone that he doesn't expect the viewers to understand the details of his various scams and frauds but that they are all illegal -- this is also significant: Scorsese doesn't trust the audience to grasp the intricacies of high finance and tells them so.) The first 45 minutes or so of the film are good, raucous and vulgar fun -- we enjoy seeing rogues at work and the movie-making is exuberant. The last hour of the picture is pretty much a drag, but this part of the film is clearly a Scorsese picture and has some merit: we get to see some domestic abuse (Marty Scorsese loves to show beautiful women being beat up) and there is a certain intensity to some of the scenes between DiCaprio's character and his trophy wife. But the film's middle hour is completely redundant and, worse, boring in an almost baffling way -- who would have thought that orgies and spectacular excess could be so dull? Curiously, Scorsese completely loses any sense of rhythm, a peculiar failing because, if nothing else, the old master's films have always been brilliantly and incisively edited. The movie has no dramatic arc and there is no conflict of any sort. It's nothing more than spectacle, as hollow in some ways as a typical Hollywood blockbuster involving the Iron Man or the Fantastic Four or Batman. Scorsese is enamoured with DiCaprio's hammy acting -- he's like a less appealing Ray Liotta -- and he indulges his star with innumerable close-ups, allowing DiCaprio to make not one, but, at least, three St. Cripin's Day speeches to his assembled minions, the last of them almost unbearably sentimental and maudlin. Furthermore, these St. Crispin's day speeches, particularly the last are almost comically inept, sub-Mamet posturing. In the last speech, in particular, an entire sub-plot involving a female employee is referenced -- but we have never seen this woman before and have no idea who she is and Scorsese hasn't bothered to lay any foundation for this maudlin sequence. (Of course, I understand Scorsese's point, a theme that like everything else in this movie is ridiculously over-determiend -- he wants to show that the same man tearfully addressing his loyal troops is willing to betray them at the drop of a hat, but, surely, this message could be more economically conveyed.) At every juncture, DiCaprio is allowed to emote and shriek obscenities; the problem with the performance is that it has literally no place to go. DiCaprio just screams more and more loudly and grits his teeth as if suffering a severely uncomfortable bowel movement and, sometimes, throws tantrums so impressive that the veins in this throat stand out and his face turns red -- this is neat to see but it has nothing to do with acting. Every plot point is repeated four or five times and the endless orgies and sex scenes end up being completely flaccid -- this is because nothing in the film seems even remotely true to life. DiCaprio's character is so incomprehensibly stupid that he tries to bribe an FBI man and has to have the distinction between the SEC and the FBI explained to him. In the big crowd scenes, every member of DiCaprio's organization seems slavishly obedient to their boss and absurdly gung-ho -- is it true that there wasn't a single sane person in DiCaprio's entire, massive trading operation, a single person who didn't obediently cry "Sieg Heil!" to their Fuehrer's machinations? -- the scenes showing the devotion of DiCaprio's lieutenants and employees are totally unconvincing and poorly staged to boot. There are scenes that don't make any sense at all: in one sequence, Rob Reiner, playing the hero's father, discusses female pubic hair with his son -- the conversation is so glaringly unconvincing that the audience cringes in dismay. no father and son in the world have ever had a conversation of this kind. The orgies involving crowds of perfect movie-star bodies are the purest fantasy and not even convincing as pornography. (I've been at cocaine parties with crooked and super-wealthy people and the kind of stuff shown in the movie isn't even remotely true to life.) Even worse, the sequences involving plea bargaining with the Feds simply recycle hoary cliches from third-rate TV shows about cops and robbers -- no wealthy man would ever act the way DiCaprio behaves in these sequences. It's all totally and complete phony and, worse, morally meretricious. Most people who see this film will admire DiCaprio's character and want to emulate him -- this is the same problem afflicting Brian DePalma's "Scarface," a film that "The Wolf of Wall Street" resembles in its ambivalent approach to its hero. The moral point is completely buried under a mountain of footage encouraging the audience to admire the antics of the vicious main character. In fact, Scorsese clearly allies himself with DiCaprio's character and the corrupt one percent against the rest of us: this is evident in a sequence equating the FBI man's ride on the subway with DiCaprio's transportation to jail on a similar public conveyance, a bus -- the FBI man with his limited salary is perceived by the film as a fool, a chump, and a prisoner; this point is rammed home by the cut from the FBI man on the subway to a shot showing DiCaprio transported to prison. "The Wolf of Wall Street" is surprisingly bad and, even, incompetent. In one scene, Scorsese puts two equally bland blonde bombshells on the screen -- one is Latvian and the other is the hero's wife -- and we literally can't tell them apart. There is nothing in this picture that Scorsese hasn't done better, more authentically, and with more pictorial authority in other movies. "The Wolf of Wall Street" suggests that Scorsese needs to extricate himself from Leonardo DiCaprio's baleful influence -- the two men have made five films together; this should be their last.