Leonardo DiCaprio’s most charismatic performance ever anchors Martin Scorsese’s robust and raunchy lowlifes-of-high-finance comedy The Wolf of Wall Street.
This is their greatest teaming, a veritable Citizen Kane of the post-“greed is good” era — three hours of cocaine and orgies and high-living by the sorts of gauche gamblers who brought that age, and the world economy, to its knees.
It is Scorsese’s La Dolce Vita, a manic, coke-fuelled stock market “Goodfellas” following the rise and epic fall of a crook. All that’s missing are the victims, and the outrage.
DiCaprio is Jordan Belfort, an eager-beaver young broker-in-training who takes the mesmerising patter from his drugs, sex and making-money mentor Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey) to heart. The name of the game, Hanna purrs, is “moving the money from the client’s pocket to your pocket.”
A light goes off in idealistic Jordan’s head. Who cares if the client does well? It’s all about your commissions, your shady deals, getting rich because “money makes you a better person.”
A light goes off in the viewer’s head, too. Before anybody starts stamping DiCaprio’s name on the Oscar, here’s old Matthew to remind us that nobody has had a better year acting in the movies — nobody. If Mark Hanna had more than two scenes, McConaughey might have stolen the movie.
But this isn’t Oliver Stone’s preachy, good-man-falls-far opera Wall Street. This is about Jordan’s layoff during the financial crash of 1987 and his rebirth as a penny stocks-trading bottom feeder, the sort of smooth, money-printing huckster who lures proteges and followers like a revival preacher.
Donnie (Jonah Hill) is the first. Assorted other “guys from the neighborhood” follow.
That’s the genius of this. The savvier Wall Street pundits noticed how brokers, traders and derivatives specialists went from making a very good living in the early Reagan years to making obscene amounts of money by the end of the Reagan years. And these pundits asked “How did these goons get so smart?” And “How do they figure they’re worth that kind of money?”
The Wolf of Wall Street captures the delusional, under-educated ignoramuses with nothing but hunger who nag clients into buying stocks that might make them money, might lose money. But either way, these guys got paid.
DiCaprio brings a religious fervour to this performance. Where his Gatsby was shy, aloof and shady, Jordan Belfort is a combination of Oral Roberts and Joel Osteen, pep rallying his flock to his prosperity gospel.
“There is no nobility in poverty,” he thunders. “I want you to deal with your problems by getting RICH!.”
Marriages founder and a mountain of cocaine goes up Jordan and his team’s noses. Hill, wearing shiny, fake teeth and that boyish hedonism that’s been his trademark, brings a crackling, improvisational feel to his scenes with DiCaprio, a blur of words and blow blasting from one to the other as they cannot believe how rich they’re getting and how they’re squandering all this money.
The otherworldly beauty Margot Robbie plays “The Duchess of Bay Ridge”, stunning but just as New York working class as any of them once she opens her “Guinea Gulch” (Italian-Brooklyn) mouth. Or course Jordan must have her, but she makes little impression beyond the lust that first inspires him. Kyle Chandler blandly plays the FBI agent who puts Jordan in his sights.
It’s a movie whose melodramatic flourishes — a storm at sea in which all Jordan and Donnie can do is cope with Quaaludes, a plane crash — are made no less melodramatic by the fact that they’re actually true.
Three hours might not seem excessive for a satiric indictment of Wall Street ethics. But for a comedy that glamorises the Bacchanalia of Belfort’s world — dwarf tossing, stripper-packed office parties, all manner of drugs, the pursuit of sexsploits further and further from conventional — it’s a bit much. There’s too much repetition, too many scenes left in to show off the high-rollers’ endless array of human failings and petty ambitions.
For such a manic movie, Scorsese never brings urgency to the proceedings. That’s a big reason this “Goodfellas” has no sense of tragedy or judgment to it. It amuses, but never makes us feel.
Our most moral crime film creator sits on the fence, observing and enjoying the mayhem, forcing us to make the “See where this got us?” leap. Because he, like the greedy grovelers his movie documents, was having too much fun to bother with that.
Actors, as a rule, like to say that they “never judge” a character they’re playing, no matter how loathsome. Even villains, the logic goes, don’t look in the bathroom mirror in the morning, waxing the moustache they’re about to twirl before throwing the heroine down a well.
But Jonah Hill? He’s judging his guy, Donnie Azoff, a real-life Wall Street bottom-feeder and scene stealer in The Wolf of Wall Street.
“I couldn’t find a way around it,” Hill says. “I mean, I kept looking for things to like about the guy, things we had in common. And I just couldn’t.”
Donnie has an over-eager charm when we first meet him in Wolf. He sees stock trader Jordan Belfort’s fancy, vintage Jaguar E-Type, rudely presses him to find out what he earns and promptly quits his own sales job to become a disciple of The Wolf of Wall Street, played by Leonardo DiCaprio. Donnie’s got an overly brilliant smile and a back story, which is the first sign this dude isn’t right. Yeah, he married his “hot cousin.” What, somebody else should have her?
“Everybody has a little of Donnie in them,” Hill laughs. “You know, that desire to do whatever you want, to be filthy, ridiculously rich. But if you’re a good person, there’s just a TINY bit of Donnie in you.This guy has no impulse control.”
Hill, 30, has been a reliably rude funnyman since 2007’s “Superbad,” playing characters that often come off as variations on an “impulse control” theme. In film after film, he’s an eating, drinking, cursing, lusting, self-absorbed drug-coveting Bacchus. Last summer, he passed a version of that hedonist off as himself in the blasphemous blockbuster, “This is the End.” But the real Jonah thinks of himself as more of a moralist than that.
“Donnie is 100 percent that thing that we don’t like to show within ourselves,” Hill says. “He has no moral compass. No morality. He treats people horribly. He’s the most selfish person in the world. I mean, who wouldn’t like to be him? Or hate him? He wasn’t someone I would want in my life.”
But for a few months, he was. Working for his hero, Martin Scorsese — “Goodfellas is the reason I wanted to make movies” — Hill had to get up every morning and literally put on his “game face.”
“His teeth were whiter than white. That’s from Belfort’s book. I wore a prosthetic set of teeth, and that was tough because I’m supposed to be doing a different accent, a different voice. When I first put in the teeth, they gave me this horrible lisp. I had to practice and practice to get rid of it. Tim Monich, our dialect coach, let me practice talking with him hours every day. No-one in my personal life would put up with that. Dedicate a couple of hours talking with me, with those teeth in, doing that accent? Forget it.
“I would call different stores like Best Buy or Target and talk to them as Donnie, in character, about products that they had.”
Donnie, Hill decided, was a working-class lug “trying to pass himself off as WASPy, upper-class, upper-crust. That’s the key to who he is.”
Hill is earning Oscar buzz for his performance, thanks to rave reviews. He is “not (just) comic relief here but a credible, if weird, figure,” The Hollywood Reporter noted, praising the fact that Hill “keeps offering surprises” right to the movie’s end. Donnie matches Jordan excess for excess — lying, cheating, snorting and spending all his ill-gotten gains, reveling in the amorality of it all.
Hill’s gift for spontaneity on the set — improvising — is much in evidence. And that fits the character.
“Everything Peter Brandon says in Moneyball is supposed to be incredibly deliberate. Thought over. Thoughtful,” Hill says, remembering his first outing in a serious movie, where improvising funny lines wouldn’t work. “Donnie, having no impulse control, was perfect for improvisation. Every decision, everything he blurts out, was just that second. That’s what he’s thinking. That’s what he’s saying.”
Hill says he hopes “not EVERYBODY on Wall Street is like this.” After all, everybody — especially movie stars — has skin in the stock market game. “Your average Wall Street trader doesn’t get up in the morning and ruin somebody’s life. These guys did, every day. They stole from people. What greed makes people do just shocks me.”
Hill has a sequel to 21 Jump Street due out in March, and another film in the can. But Wolf is hitting theaters and earning accolades during a rare idle period for Hill. He’s not sure how to follow “the most demanding, most complex role” he’s ever taken.
“For the first time in my career, I don’t know what I’m doing next. I’m excited about that. I’ve been lucky, these past couple of years, getting to express different sides of myself. I’ve gotten to try all sorts of different roles. You keep working with people who are better than you are and you get better. That’s all I can shoot for.” — McClatchy-Tribune News Service/MCT