The Truth About TWoWS: Cocaine In The Ass

Rating: 6/10 (23 January 2014)

INTRODUCTION The Wolf of Wall Street invites you to experience the decadence of Jordan Belfort who during the 80s lived a life of astronomic excess.
PRO 1. Martin Scorsese employs masterful camera technique, bullet-speed paced scenes of typically 10-30 secs a piece peppered with typically engrossing avant-garde shots, eg. deliberate dis-continuity to represent Jordan's distorted view of reality (remember the never ending stairs?), sitting on the boat Jordan bathes in golden sunlight whilst the FBI agent's face is cast in shadow, incessant tell-tale extreme close-ups, sudden one-line inner monologues, mini-dolly inward tracking shots expressing paranoia (DRUGS?!), the bloody tear etc.
PRO 2. DiCaprio, as usual, portrays a fantastically eccentric and charming character that you can't take your eyes off for a second.
PRO 3. Refreshingly - if brutal, at times - explicit and liberal in content, sating our wild greed for materialistic desires perhaps like no movie ever has before... Strangely enough, Gatsby did that too but TWoWS just did it that much better.
CON 1. To use a particularly appropriate analogy, the film writes a cheque that is never cashed: parading endless drugs, prostitutes, luxury yachts, penthouses and aircraft was a great start but the REAL magic trick would have been to sour the experience and convince us that all that wealth and power is worthless in the face of genuine substance of character. Anything less is just a 3 hour music video. And there can be no doubt this was, to some extent, their intention as the line "chickens come home to roost" was used to signify exactly that kind of (ineffectual) moment in the story. *I accept that they achieved as much as making the experience giddy, spinning out of control with his sickening addictions. However, the victims of his crimes were never so much as acknowledged, the comeuppance was non-existent and what feeble attempts at self-destruction that were made(eg. crashing the car with child, his wife leaving him, Donnie snitching on him despite his example, the yacht capsizing, the plane exploding, the prison sentencing etc) failed to make anywhere near a balancing impact on the viewer, ultimately resulting in a film that WILL convince you greed can be good... as long as you get away with it.
CON 2. The final scene of the film, in which Jordan is shown to still be enjoying a life of luxury, abruptly sacrificed what little credibly it had established with a sudden, COMPLETELY CONTRADICTORY - if not equally intriguing - point about American capitalism being an injustice we all endorse. If this was the moral of the story - that Scorsese deliberately wanted to antagonise the active audience and promote a change in social attitudes through the offensive continuation of people like Belfort's undeserved success - it felt more like a footnote suggesting an alternative ending to a film that was otherwise already far down a completely different rabbit hole.
CON 3. There was no character progression, no transition, no evolution, no JOURNEY made spiritually. The characters are all exactly the same people as they were at the start of the movie and without that you really ain't got much! *Again, they knew this was happening as DiCaprio becomes a little morose in the last 20 mins, but again, it was just a grain of salt in the face of a kilo of cocaine.
A wonderfully entertaining film with superb production value and buckets of laugh-out-loud moments undermined by a cast and crew with little or no real experience in 'the dark side'. At least The Departed actually DID put you off being a gangster - which is more than can be said of Goodfellas or Gangs of New York - whereas this is a film which failed to prescribe to the only challenge its concept offered; to create a sense of disillusionment about wealth, rather than simply glamorising it and spinning a high powered electro-magnet next to a lot of young / naive people's moral compass. Boardwalk is infinitely superior. Breaking the rules is 'bad' for a reason and whether the criminals of this world have the grace to recognise it or not, they always lose one way or another. I wonder how likely it is that Scorsese or DiCaprio would have made this film if their families had been robbed by Belfort, resulting in their mother or daughter or son or brother dying from a lack of health insurance they could no longer pay for? Not very likely, I'd say...