![]() ![]() The sight of Jordan desperately trying to get back home, wriggling on his belly towards his Lamborghini Countach and opening the passenger-side scissor door with his foot, made this critic laugh harder than anything else in films in the past year. It involves Jordan and Donnie incapacitated by elephant-tranquiliser-grade ‘Lemmon 714’ Quaaludes in a moment of crisis that demands fast action and quick thinking. One elaborate physical comedy set piece is the movie’s hysterical high point. As McConaughey’s character makes explicit in an initiation that hangs over the entire film, sexual release is only a means to prime the pump so as to make more money – the Stratton Oakmont gang even equate different classes of prostitutes with different grades of stocks. There’s his rubber-torsoed dancing at his wedding party, much giffed since appearing in the film’s trailer, and the elaborate seduce-and-stick-it-in pantomime he enacts while illustrating how to high-pressure sell a cold call via speakerphone. The comedy here isn’t only verbal but also physical, and it’s in this department that DiCaprio’s performance enters the realm of the undeniable. Along with its three-hour runtime, this baggy plotting may make Wolf a somewhat harder sell to audiences but it’s a deeper movie than The Departed – among the best that Scorsese has made. ![]() The film is essentially a chain of anecdotes: Jordan interrogating his gay butler for money that went missing during a sex party Jordan using the family of friends to transfer money into Swiss bank accounts Jordan’s yacht capsizing when crossing the Mediterranean in a mad rush to retrieve the money from those same accounts. Loaded with thrilling verbal runs, this film is the nearest thing to a pure comedy that Scorsese has made since 2006’s The Departed.īased on Belfort’s own memoir and written for the screen by Terence Winter, Wolf lacks The Departed’s suspense-making genre architecture. In the business of selling speculation, talk is the coin of the realm, and The Wolf of Wall Street is enamoured of palaver, from the Texas smooth talk of Matthew McConaughey, playing Jordan’s mentor Mark Hanna, to the blue-collar New York Jewish patter of Rob Reiner as Jordan’s towering, hotheaded father. Jordan is a born bullshitter and, like many bullshitters, he has the gift of inspiring supreme confidence. With the offices the scene of many a group grope, even sex isn’t private. ![]() When Jordan’s lieutenant Donnie Azoff ( Jonah Hill, wearing bleached teeth and playing a version of Jordan’s real-life accomplice Danny Porush) needs to prove a point, he makes a soapbox of the nearest handy desk and acts out his power play in full view of the ‘wolf pit’, eating one hapless employee’s goldfish, or pissing on a subpoena. When preparing to step down in return for clemency from the Securities and Exchange Commission, Jordan reneges in front of his office – he realises that if he ceases to be Stratton Oakmont, he ceases to be. The offices of Stratton Oakmont aren’t just a workplace for Jordan, but his own private public theatre, a place where he can stalk the boards, reassuring himself of his own success by re-enacting the legend of it. Like a great number of Scorsese protagonists with whom he otherwise wouldn’t seem to have much in common, including Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin, Jordan only exists when validated in the eyes of the world. Stockbroker Jordan Belfort, the ‘wolf’ of the title (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), thrives as master of ceremonies in a milieu where the only self that matters is the performed self. Produced by Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Riza Aziz, Joey McFarland, Emma Koskoffĭistributor Universal Pictures International UK & Eire ![]()
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