Going in to see The Wolf of Wall Street on Christmas day was something I had been looking forward to since I had first seen the trailer (any movie trailer that thumps along to a Kanye song usually gets me pretty pumped). Unfortunately, my beloved Matin Scorsese let me down on this one. Don’t get me wrong, I’m by no means a prude. I love Breaking Bad, Tarantino, and even zesty dramas like good old Cruel Intentions, but The Wolf of Wall Street lacked a substance that even fluffy Cruel Inentions pulls off. I understand that the point is to depict the ultimate self-destruction of an individual so consumed by his own greed that he completely deteriorates, but this story has been done before in films like Wall Street and its inevitable sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. So, to make it stand out, the writers chocked this tale full of graphic sex, drugs, and party scenes to the point where even I was uncomfortable.
The climactic demise of the protagonist culminated in an almost too casual domestic rape scene. This moment is extremely underplayed compared to the excessive explicit imagery appearing throughout the film. To me, this was the worst thing this criminal had done the entire movie and it was left completely ambiguous and uncontroversial. This may have been an intentional choice by the production team in attempt to make this final horrific act stand out against the earlier glorified and glamorized depictions of misbehavior. However, if that is truly the case, they were unsuccessful because most viewers were left unsure whether it was a rape at all, myself included. Instead of standing out, this deeply important scene fell by the wayside.
As a filmmaker,  if you’re going to make a three hour movie, you better be adding moments that are really worthwhile. Scorsese just lost me at so many points in the film and I walked out of the theater feeling like I had made no connections with any of the characters. The writing was shallow, the characters were not relatable, the soundtrack didn’t make sense with the scenes. Overall it was really disappointing compared to Scorsese’s usual quality of production shown in some of my favorite films like Goodfellas and The Departed. These movies included excess sex and violence, but this was balanced out by the quality of the story.
Despite my overall disappointment with the film, I will say that the acting and cinema were very well done. Unfortunately, the writing failed to deliver the quality promised by the trailer and thus the shining acting went mostly unnoticed in my eyes. I’d be really interested in reading the autobiography of the real Jordan Belfort, which served as the inspiration for the film, to see if it contains any redeemable elements of good storytelling that are missing from the film.
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