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It’s difficult to know where this came from. ('Any meaningful perspective on the greedfest of the period is obscured by the gleefulness of the depiction,’ wrote Joe Morgenstern in-O, irony of ironies!- The Wall Street Journal.) As such, it’s indicative of a disturbing trend in contemporary cinema, one that goes all the way from development through to production: this odd need to underline every motivation, predetermine every response, and clarify its maker’s own position. (And you get the feeling Scorsese-who had his own cocaine-fuelled lost weekend during the mid-1970s-would know.) But true or not, the lack of breathing space here becomes its own point, as deadening a surfeit of pleasure as anything since the shooting-up sequences in Aronofsky’s Requiem For a Dream. (For a time it seemed unlikely that the finished film would make its scheduled Christmas release-date.) Occasionally their haste shows: there are some badly-matched cuts, oddly unconvincing reversals, occasional continuity errors-though Schoonmaker has recently claimed these were deliberate, intended to communicate the jarring disconnectedness of the characters’ drug-addled perspectives. Most of all, though, it’s in the sheer, numbing intensity which the film lays out in its opening moments and then sustains, almost without respite, for the following three hours-and it says a lot that Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker rushed to extract this version from a reported four-hour first cut. As if the possibility of his own extinction was too alien a concept to contemplate, much less comprehend. Belfort, casually mentions the deaths of various people from his circle, their demises (a heart attack, a suicide) shrugged off in baffled asides, quickly passed over. Or the way that the executives, when planning a dwarf-throwing party for their office, agree that it’s better (as well as legally safer) not to consider their hires as human beings at all, but as 'things.’ It’s how our narrator, the fast-talking Mr. It’s in the humiliated tears of a woman who has accepted ten grand to have her head shaved in front of her screaming, jeering co-workers.
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One can certainly read things in various ways-the ideal text sustains many interpretations-but still: you would have to be an imbecile not to see a moral argument being advanced here, ringing like a high, clear bell through all this noise. It’s an extraordinary argument, one that almost determinedly misunderstands the movie that has been made. To summarise: Scorsese and Winter have been accused of valorising the milieu they portray here-a riotous, non-stop, coke- and Quaalude-fuelled bacchanalia of greed and rage, of unchecked appetites and vast, destructive energies. But then I recalled the way this film had been attacked upon its US release, and realised that these days, when it comes to spelling out one’s message, it seems one cannot be too overt. I didn’t particularly need that beat to be followed, less than ten seconds later, by a second, rather more exegetic line ('We are telephone terrorists!’ Belfort roars)-and for a moment I regretted that screenwriter Terence Winter had felt compelled to include it.
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(Though given this discomfiting parallel, some viewers might pause to consider who in fact has wreaked greater damage upon the ordinary citizens of the United States-the 9/11 hijackers, or the still-mostly-unpunished robber-barons of Wall Street?) Two varieties of toxic extremism-and the same enemy, America only the 'cause’ is different. Which is fitting, since Belfort’s role is essentially that of a self-appointed prophet as DiCaprio delivered the line, I thought at once of Osama bin Laden, inculcating his similarly fanatical followers in the desert.
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It’s an evangelical moment, a testament to the allure of Mammon. In it, penny-stock broker and full-time sybarite Jordan Belfort (incarnated with lusty, all-in zeal by Leonardo DiCaprio) is telling his traders, a motley crew of misfits and frat-boys and Armani-clad sociopaths, that he will make each and every one of them rich beyond their wildest dreams, if they just speak the words he has taught them. There’s a scene, just over an hour into this long, relentless, frequently brilliant film-Martin Scorsese’s finest in more than a decade-that encapsulates its entire argument, no small feat in something so jagged and plotless. You would have to be an imbecile not to see a moral argument being advanced here