Kritiken

This heretically shallow philosophy seems to have liberated Scorsese. The Wolf of Wall Street is very funny, a kind of big-budget Jackass with one outrageous stunt after another. It's also one-dimensional, staying with the alienated sociopaths in their frenzied little bubble-world. The very last shot is the only one that offers some perspective... and the most effective moment in the whole three-hour movie.

The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013) is a repulsive affair. A hybrid of Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987) and American Pie (Chris and Paul Weitz, 1999) it comes short of the former as well as the latter, it comes short even of their shortcomings. If it regards itself as comedy, provided that comedy is still supposed to be comic... it can bring laughter only to the utterly dehumanised...

Never before have money, drugs and sex appeared so unalluring on the big screen, or, stated another way, never before have such revolting characters been shown doing things that under other circumstances might have seemed potentially attractive. And this is part and parcel of the movie's critical stance. These characters are drawn broadly; the nail of their outsized physical attributes hit on the head repeatedly, mercilessly.

Belfort, in whose person we can locate a nexus of Scorsese's major concerns (masculine braggadocio, economic striving, criminality as performance), is his most apt subject in ages. For a filmmaker who has often challenged us to see how far we can strain our empathy and identification (think of Rupert Pupkin, Travis Bickle, and Jake La Motta), the push-pull bargain of repulsion and seduction Scorsese strikes while telling The Wolf of Wall Street is practically Faustian.

The Jerry Lewis link is obvious from the Quaalude crawling scene, even signaled by Jordan Belfort saying he had entered the "cerebral palsy stage" of the drug. But DiCaprio is no Jerry Lewis. While he is delightfully rubbery throughout (and hasn't used his body so well since Catch Me if You Can), he is always too self-conscious and too handsome to be a real Jerry. But at his best he is as louche as Dean Martin.

Ultimately, Wolf's portrait of the unscrupulous seller becomes just as much a portrait of the undiscriminating buyers: the exploited cogs of late-capitalist America, who, no less than their/our exploiters, help perpetuate the disassociation of profit and product, worship the false god of Success that helps maintain an unduly privileged, fundamentally amoral class, and forgive the outright crooks that class fosters as if they were a favourite child.

If this isn't the first time [Scorsese has] made a meaty, showy, visually rich and music-driven movie about a tough kid from outer-borough New York made good — or rather, made bad — this telling of the tale possesses enormous cinematic energy and a killer supporting cast full of hilarious delights.

As long as Wolf is prowling theaters, I scarcely have any desire to talk about anything else, and 179 minutes of such densely packed cinema is certainly worth its weight in verbiage... I found Wolf to be as fleet as its lupine title would suggest; and even when revisiting the same territory, which a film about wallowing must necessarily do, it devised fresh strategies for seemingly every new scene.

It runs three hours, and was reportedly cut down from four by Scorsese's regular editorThelma Schoonmaker. It's a testament to Scorsese and Winter and their collaborators that one could imagine watching these cackling swine for five hours, or ten, while still finding them fascinating, and our own fascination with them disturbing. This is a reptilian brain movie. Every frame has scales.

Scorsese turns national tragedy into farce, and rarely in a way that feels itself distasteful. For three hours the movie operates at a ridiculous comedic pitch. You never forget you're at the circus. You never lose site of the lawlessness, the reckless pleasure, the sheer lunacy and lack of regulation. Scorsese hurls the madness at you like a pie in the face.

Compared to the slick fluidity of Scorsese's last decade of filmmaking, this is a profoundly unkempt film... What we're seeing is a generous dose of the raw, disorderly spirit of Scorsese's 1973 film Mean Streets mixed with the glossy refinement he has brought to his later work. This sense of sloppiness is in keeping with the antic, unhinged relentlessness of the film's central figure.

The movie has a sharply rhythmic swing, like a great jazz band in flat-out rumble, thanks to Scorsese's stylistic inventiveness and the wild, exhilarating performances that he elicits from his cast. Leonardo DiCaprio, playing Belfort, gives the first fully satisfying, elbows-out, uninhibited screen performance that I've seen from him. (DiCaprio is thirty-nine, but I intend no insult here—Humphrey Bogart didn't come fully into his own until after forty.)