The Wolf of Wall Street is fun not only because we may secretly wish we were heartless millionaires by the time we were 26 it’s fun because it is insane, passionate, leave-it-all-on-the-field cinema, from one director and a ton of performers who know exactly what they’re doing. There are clearly even greater performances in Scorsese’s original four-hour cut from a slew of famous people-Jean Dujardin, Jon Favreau, Jon Bernthal, Cristin Milioti-who shine brief and bright here. Matthew McConaughey takes a single scene-a single lunch!-and shapes the movie in his image. Kyle Chandler is great as the straight-arrow G-man committed to bringing Belfort down. Rob Reiner is great in this movie, as Jordan Belfort’s titanically angry father. He uses 40 years of cinematic experience to judge Belfort and company more harshly than the world ever did. Instead of indulging in all the bad behavior before about-facing for redemption in the end, Scorsese puts the celebration and the revulsion side by side. Scorsese, who rode the wobbly rail between comedy and terror to iconic perfection in Goodfellas, does it over and over again in The Wolf of Wall Street. A beach party, where Jonah Hill’s Donnie Azoff is so blitzed on pills that he whips out his penis in the middle of the room, looks like a blast one moment and a nightmare the next. It is horrifying to watch Belfort and his crew use a dwarf as a human dart it is hilarious to watch them justify the act to themselves in a board-room meeting. What sets the film apart from other celebrations of debauchery like Project X and The Hangover is not just skill it’s that it is possible to be revolted by what’s onscreen and thoroughly enchanted by it at the same time. The Wolf of Wall Street allows us to feel what it was like to be those guys-the wild rush of drugs, the insane power brought by money-and to not feel that bad about enjoying it. In real life, a group of Wall Streeters probably not so different from Jordan Belfort wrecked a lot more than a boat, and barely had to apologize. Martin Scorsese, returning to his familiar realm of men behaving badly, isn’t interested in either side of that moral equation. Movies have always indulged in bad-but-thrilling behavior and gotten away with it by promising redemption or contrition in the end, whether it’s rooting for a bad guy to succeed or watching someone murder for the “right” reasons. Jordan Belfort rises to the top by scheming, lying, shamelessly screwing over the little guy, and behaving as badly as you can possibly imagine-he starts the film blowing coke into a woman’s ass, ends it by physically threatening his wife, and finds time to wreck a yacht in-between. The bad guys win, over and over again, in The Wolf of Wall Street. It’s the look on the faces of the people watching Belfort, who has transformed himself into a motivational speaker. But the key to the film is not the moment when Belfort is arrested, or even the public speech he gives in which he confesses he did things that were wrong. The Wolf of Wall Street is a familiar story about a rise and fall-Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort starts a shady stock-trading business, turns himself into a millionaire, then gets collared by the Feds for the dozens of illegal acts that got him there.
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