Not La Dolce Vita

Rating: Null/10 (26 December 2013)

The emperor's new clothes, the elephant in the middle of the living room, whatever you want to call it, but the uncomfortable truth must finally be faced--the DiCaprio-Scorsese teaming has never been all that cinematically, and WWS is no exception. It would be a fool's errand to point fingers, saying who's to blame, etc. Who can say? And it hasn't all been mediocre. The Departed was to die for--but there was a lot more than Leo. Shutter Island was grand. And it isn't that pre-Leo Scorsese didn't have his egregious stumbles--think the all-star teaming in Casino. But Gangs, Aviator, and now this film, are all terrific demonstrations of something that doesn't work--brilliant filmmaking surrounding so-so acting and a very so-so script. In WWS, we have exquisitely filmed excess that must be leading to some big moral revelation because otherwise why have such a gargantuan build up, no? But not really. Dolce Vita this is not, and yet one feels that Scorsese, like Fellini, wants to go there with this material. We even get a tiny tribute to La Strada in the bedroom scene when Belfort's wife keeps provoking him by throwing water in his face. But it ends up being more of a throwaway--like many scenes in the film. You wonder whether some offscreen financier was occasionally slapping Scorsese on the hand, saying, "More spring break, more spring break." Like Casino, it's a series of funny, opulent, overly long scenes strung together chronologically than a real drama with complications experienced by a main character undergoing a moral struggle. Its sexual situations and language are also surprisingly frank given that's it's a mainstream film, but this may just be part of the pornographication of mainstream life. The fatiguing amount of drug use and drunken sex, Belfort's inability to experience anything without being high--all of this seems to be leading somewhere. In the middle of a storm at sea, while Belfort's helicopter is getting swept off the deck of his yacht, Jonah Hill is ordered to go below deck to get the quaaludes out of the flooded stateroom. That's a pretty meaningful action. And it required some heavy duty filming. But nothing really comes of it. Weird. It's easy to suppose that this a vision of a lower-middle class character becoming corrupted by the excesses of the '80s. But the guy is such an empty vessel to begin with that you really only end up with empty vessel + drugs + booze + sex. You can't even say he's a hypocrite because he never stood for anything to begin with. Surely there was more to this guy than that. When the Lemonheads' version of Mrs. Robinson plays you get that a feeling of complete spiritual emptiness. But that passes quickly because the film is so overbusy and needs to bounce to the next outrageous situation. It's a highly watchable film in a voyeuristic way, but even then it has so much Leo narration that fully admits to the insanity of what's going on that you never even get the chance to feel dirty from peeping Tom-ism. He is very reliable narrator, so there's very little irony. There's not that much to actually say about the film because it doesn't say that much. The only reason it gets this much ink is because this is the director of Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, etc. These are major movies. But this is more Scarface meets the Hangover. It's a guy's film, make no doubt it. No woman is going to like it because it revels in the adolescent antics of grown up men that women find repulsive. Party!