I love Scorsese. He's shown his directing range recently, making Hugo, which I loved, along with Shutter Island and The Aviator. None of the three contain the dark, violent anti-heroes Scorsese is known for. The Departed is more what Scorsese is known for, gritty violence and moral ambiguity. Somehow every one of the movies I just mentioned, except Hugo, stars Leonardo DiCaprio.
Wolf of Wall Street is a return to standard Scorsese, in many ways. Not particularly violent, but still telling the story of an interesting character doing evil things because it's seems fun to be evil, until you're caught. Wolf is essentially Goodfellas, but in place of violent street level crime we get white collar crime and orgies. That was the description I'd heard before going to the movie, and it sounded great. Unfortunately, the movie was far less exciting than that.
Leo plays an ambitious stock broker who is just starting out on a promising career when Black Monday occurs, putting him out of a job. Down and out, he finds employment at an extremely shady penny stock operation (run by Spike Jonze in a great cameo). He uses shady sales tactics to convince people who don't have disposable income to invest in companies that will never turn a profit. He eventually turns this into a billion dollar trading firm, known for wild orgies, ridiculous drug use, rousing speeches and lots of illegal activity. Screwing over investors was not enough, he decided he also needed to hide money from the government, cheat on IPOs, and launder money. All in all, too much wasn't enough.
I found the movie to be too long, boring and repetitive. Leo's character skims on the explanations of how they are ripping people off, which in many ways is more interesting to me than seeing the 5th orgy. I get it Scorsese, Leo likes to fuck. Move on. Leo also has a number of "rousing" speeches, every single one was too long and not rousing to me, but I don't go for ra-ra bullshit.
The highlight of the movie is Jonah Hill's character. Loved it. He and Leo's scenes are hilarious. There's also some great nudity from the actress playing Leo's wife, Naomi. Fun fact: She's Australian. I couldn't tell.
People are saying Leo's performance is great. I guess it is. Thinking about it and looking back on previous Oscar contenders and winners, it seems the Academy loves yelling. That's really all Leo's character did, lots and lots of yelling. Otherwise nothing remarkable to me, he played a guy.
Even though the entire movie takes place in pretty standard settings (offices, boardrooms, bedrooms, etc.) Scorsese has some amazing shots. There is a particularly impressive overhead that zooms across the ceiling of the trading room then pulls back. Beautiful work.
Wolf marks 5 collaborations between Scorsese and DiCaprio, moving DiCaprio ever closer to overtaking Di Nero as Scorsese's favorite. Only three more to go! Assuming Di Nero doesn't come back. Oooooooh, maybe a collaboration!!!!
First Viewing: 3+2+3+2+2 = 12