“The Wolf Of Wall Street” is decadent in ways “Goodfellas” isn’t because New York stockbroker Jordan Belfort who made millions upon millions of bucks selling penny ante stocks and bankrupting gullible poor people is decadent in ways that Henry Hill isn’t.
The two movies are connected at the hip but Ray Liotta’s gumbah in training has a charm that the increasingly charmless Leo DiCaprio doesn’t come close to. By the time we meet Jordan he is 24 years old and married and obsessed with money and innocence, and when it comes together its sense of outrageousness is silliness like bowling with dwarves and when it falls apart it falls apart so fast, there doesn’t seem to be anything much at stake.
I don’t necessarily need a moral kicker in my movies, but I do need a POV: this is like the Bishop who watches porn movies so he can condemn em. It is a voyeuristic fun and then it is simply voyeuristic. Which significantly better than Leo’s terrible turn in “The Great Gatsby” old boy, it continues the bafflingly successful actor’s string of atrocious performances dating back to “The Aviator”.
This is a little better than most, a cartoon cutup of all American excess with an actor who never is much more than himself. Is Leo the worst serious actor of all time? I am wracking my brain and with the exception of “Romeo And Juliet” I can’t think of one performance that has wowed me. At firsy he was really cute and bland and now he isn’t really cute and bland: Leo has the odd skill of being intense and shallow at the same time. I prefer Jonah Hill as his sidekick here and definitely Rob Reiner as his father.
At just under three hours of length it might have been a bore and while it is a cuisinart of a show, with everything rushing round and round and round, mixed up over and over again. By the end I was a little bored of everything except looking at Margot Robbie naked. Which is, well, something.
Based on a true story of a really huge asshole who stole millions upon millions so he could blow it on ‘ludes, coke and hookers, Martin trusts us enough not to make us choke on the moral, he assumes we realize that people’s lives have been destroyed by this repulsive monster and his cohorts greed, just as Wall Street is destroying the US by making the money stagnate. But he glamorizes what he despises and in the end it is just, well, a decadent bore. The moral here is that life without a moral center might make you rich but man will it make you boring.
Grade: C