MOHAMMAD KAMRAN JAWAID
“The Wolf of Wall Street” is also, with keen hindsight, the most facetious movie of the year. It’s farcical nature is a decisive auteur’s move by Mr. Scorsese, and is as justified as the movie’s treatment of moralities, the chauvinistic man’s view of women, or the insistence that greed is god’s gift to mankind – of course, solely in the context of the movie Mr. Scorsese is fervent in making
A scene from movie, "The Wolf of Wall Street". - Courtesy Photo
According to Jordan Belfort, a man’s best friend isn’t greed, sex or drugs: it’s cold, hard excessiveness.
Mr. Scorsese’s snappy piece of excess is, quite surprisingly, a very deep movie about some very shallow people. Jordan Belfort – played to a hilt by Leonardo DiCaprio – is a young, uncomplicated, ambitious, newly married man from Bronx, who chose the wrong profession – stock brokering – but met the right guy on his first day of work (or vice versa). His boss, Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey, outrageous in his two scenes) is half-baked, but not necessarily harebrained, in his approach to make a profit: never let the investor roll-out with the money after a hit investment, instead keep him preoccupied with new sales, while the broker makes off with the commission.
A scene from movie, "The Wolf of Wall Street". - Courtesy Photo
Keeping people engaged in stock-hour’s rush hour traffic is mind-numbing work but Mark has a formula to deal with stress too – an insane abuse of sex and cocaine.
Belfort is sold to the advice, not for its practicality, but because the vice’s compulsion, and the inherent greed of money making, works quite harmoniously with a screwed up person’s view of the world where sexual gratification and drug abuse is the way of kings. And for a good while it is.
A scene from movie, "The Wolf of Wall Street". - Courtesy Photo
Belfort survives 1987’s Black Monday, coincidentally the first day of his promotion from an assistant to a broker, and finds his way trading penny-stocks and eventually building a small corporate empire with the most screwed-up losers in the business. (The movie, by the way, has an impressive supporting cast, including brief but deviously funny bits by Rob Reiner as Belfort’s dad and Jean Dujardin as his Swiss banker).
One of Belfort’s key men, by the way is a very aptly cast Jonah Hill, who plays Donnie Azoff, Belfort’s dumb-witted cohort in his empire – who by my own subjective view, is perhaps one of the most reprehensibly written characters written for the screen (and I mean that in a very good way).
A scene from movie, "The Wolf of Wall Street". - Courtesy Photo
Their eventual downfall, a staple in movies and real life, is less about an unexpected twist – bad people, of course, will go down, that is the law of the universe – and more about the thrill and joy of getting away with it. In that way, “The Wolf of Wall Street” is about petty criminals who make serious money by unregulated means. Mr. Scorsese, who masterminds an ambiance of relish in their triumphs, sidelines the creeping hand of the law (Kyle Chandler as Fed agent Patrick Denham), mostly because Belfort and co. couldn’t care less about the consequences.
Throughout “The Wolf of Wall Street” Mr. Scorsese’s direction, and the screenplay by Terence Winter, knows only four words: Live free, die hard!..or maybe, not die at all.
The exorbitance, especially the nudity and simulated sex that untenably springs up every five to fifteen minutes, is a fitting yet unwarranted component to the story, which by the way is adapted from the real Jordan Belfort’s autobiography.
A scene from movie, "The Wolf of Wall Street". - Courtesy Photo
Now and then Mr. Scorsese’s take is rough and dastardly. His camera, which by cognitive extension functions less like a camera and more as an external window, reframes, cranes and tracks over Belfort’s equally out-of-it staff and his key executives with so much zest that it appears almost as materialistic as the people it is capturing on negative. (The cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto, by the way, mixes a series of formats including digital and traditional film stock).
However, when there are moments Mr. Scorsese snaps out of the bedlam and stacks up a series of evenly spaces conversation pieces with mostly Mr. DiCaprio in the lead; as these keynote scenes are far-flung between a lot of self-proclaimed, self-congratulating roaring, they are at their most effective.
A scene from movie, "The Wolf of Wall Street". - Courtesy Photo
Sometimes Belfort turns and starts talking to us, as if he is simply too high on his success that he forgets the reality of the movie. The fourth wall hardly matters in any of these moments, because the feverish run Mr. Scorsese paces the narrative in, is mesmerizing without practical cinematic barricades. If Belfort talks to us (and we can discuss about whether we were part of a big-budget fictionalised Hollywood documentary afterwards), it’s only because he knows that rather than mere audiences, our experience is more akin to a cohort who secretly fancies Mr. DiCaprio’s and Mr. Scorsese’s rambunctious world.
“The Wolf of Wall Street” is also, with keen hindsight, the most facetious movie of the year. It’s farcical nature is a decisive auteur’s move by Mr. Scorsese, and is as justified as the movie’s treatment of moralities, the chauvinistic man’s view of women, or the insistence that greed is god’s gift to mankind – of course, solely in the context of the movie Mr. Scorsese is fervent in making.
Released by Paramount Pictures, “The Wolf of Wall Street” is rated A for way too much nudity, sexual situations and scenes of intense drama by people you may just have fun seeing burn.
Directed by Martin Scorsese; Produced by Mr. Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Riza Aziz, Joey McFarland and Emma Tillinger Koskoff; Written by Terence Winter (based on the book by Jordan Belfort); Cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto; Edited by Thelma Schoonmaker; amd Production design by Bob Shaw.
The movie stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Matthew McConaughey, Kyle Chandler, Rob Reiner, Jon Favreau, Cristin Milioti and Jean Dujardin.
Mohammad Kamran Jawaid has been professionally critiquing movies for a while now – say more or less ten years, exclusively for Dawn. About 400 reviews and features later (he stopped counting a long time ago), not being as young as he was before, he still feels the urge to write for another couple of centuries.
Despite living movies 24/7 (his company (http://kamranjawaid.com) helps filmmakers make movies), he is still truly, madly, deeply in love with cinema; the root cause of this anomaly requires further clinical trials. His twitter (http://twitter.com/kamranjawaid) reveals very little about him, other than him being the Senior Film Critic for Dawn.com.
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