When I was a student, one of things we loved to raise hell about was what we perceived to be censorship in the movies we watched. Hollywood movies, we had noticed, came our screens noticeably shorn of footage, particularly that which involved nudity or sexual intercourse. It was explained to us that the local classification board was not actually directly responsible for the cuts; they simply told the local distributor what they found objectionable and the distributor was the one that did the chopping. However one sliced it the end result was the same: movies that had been butchered in the name of commerce.
As the years went on, though, we noticed that classification boards became less and less eager to stamp movies with the dreaded "X" rating and more content to just classify movies, even those with supposedly taboo content, accordingly. Movies with graphic content made it into theaters untouched, especially after influential filmmaker Steven Spielberg put his foot down over an attempt by the local distributor of his holocaust masterpiece Schindler's List to chop out footage, in particular a sex scene in order to avoid an "X" rating.
If there's any point to this rambling on about censors and sex scenes, it's that the screening in Manila of Martin Scorsese's latest film, The Wolf of Wall Street shows just how far removed we are from the days of prudish classification boards threatening to ban films from theaters until every last nipple, strand of pubic hair and "pumping scene" was excised from them. NOTHING, as I understand it, was removed from this film; it was simply stamped with an "R" rated and sent straight to theaters.
The film, which chronicles the rise and fall of stock broker, entrepreneur and charlatan Jordan Befort (Leonardio di Caprio in what is likely to be one of his most well-remembered performances), is chock-full of scenes of excess as Belfort and his associates, chief of whom is Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) indulge in just about every conceivable vice known to western society.
Belfort arrives in New York in the late 1980s with his young wife (Cristin Miloti), eager to start his job as broker. He receives a bit of an eye-opening lecture from veteran stockbroker Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey in a brilliant walk-on) who tells him that to survive on Wall Street Belfort will need lots of cocaine and lots of sex. Then, the infamous Black Monday happens, wiping out the firm he works for and Belfort is left without a job. After hitting rock bottom, he gets a job in a Long Island firm selling penny stocks, and after enchanting his fellow brokers with his ability to sell thousands of dollars of stock in basically worthless companies, he hits on the scheme that will make him and his cohorts rich beyond their wildest dreams: the pump and dump scheme. What follows is nearly two and a half hours swindling, debauchery, federal investigations, more swindling, and more debauchery. Lives and marriages are ruined, copious drugs are consumed, and as stated, people get laid.
This film has been alternately criticized by many writers as glamorizing or glorifying Belfort's excess and vilifying investment bankers in general. While I don't quite agree with either school of thought, my sentiments lie more closely with the first camp in that the depiction was perhaps more positive than negative. My best evidence would have to be a line from Terence Winter's script itself: "There is no such thing as bad publicity."
In short, even though the film, which is unabashedly over-the-top, makes Belfort look like a wholly unscrupulous, lying, cheating, stealing, dwarf-tossing, wife-beating, drug-addled bastard, the ultimate takeaway here for a lot of audience members may well be that he got to live the high life with money he swindled from other people and managed to do less than two years of prison time. It may not be a glamorization, but it still feels like a stretch to call it a condemnation.
The actual Belfort, on whose memoir the film is based, appears at the very end of the movie and has, after the release of this film, even gone around telling his story to whoever will listen...not exactly a sign of comeuppance for a person who reportedly screwed over a lot of people. Between that, the unbridled bacchanalia, and the complete absence of even a glimpse of the lives Belfort's schemes (and later, his snitching) supposedly ruined, well, the film feels a lot less like an indictment of Belfort than it purports to be and more of a lurid, voyeuristic peek into the kind of life he led.
In this respect, Scorsese really outdoes himself. It really does feel like one is peeking through a knothole in a fence at someone's backyard orgy. To be fair to Scorsese, the film doesn't really titillate, as most of the nudity and sex takes place between rather quick cuts and without anything to establish the "mood" like music or lighting. The orgies, of which there are many, are basically entanglements of flesh, with flabby brokers getting as much exposure as the nubile women humping them. About the only thing we're spared is the sight of male genitalia, with apologies to anyone hoping to catch a glimpse of di Caprio's junk. Not that di Caprio, who reportedly did not use a body double, is shy; one of the scenes involves a dominatrix pulling a lighted candle out of his anus and dropping hot wax all over his back.
Such is di Caprio's utter dedication to this role and this film, that even when it started to drag, he kept me glued to the screen. He's been criticized for being insensitive to Belfort's victims, but it's very hard to fault what he has turned in here. I've seen him in a number of movies, and I have to say that this is quite unlike anything I have ever seen him do. For one thing, this is the first time I've seen him lend his body to what feels distinctly like slapstick, as exemplified by a sequence in which Belfort pumps himself full of Quaaludes (a phased-out sleeping pill that delivers a distinct high) which he thinks are duds but which, it turns out, have a delayed effect that turns his mind and body into jello, with interesting consequences for, of all things, his Lamborghini. The "high" sequence in 2012's 21 Jump Street has absolutely nothing on this sequence, which also happens to feature Jonah Hill getting completely messed-up as well.
Hill, by the way, is similarly delightful to watch; I won't debate the merits of his numerous award nominations, but I had a lot of fun seeing him as the incestuous, possibly closeted, definitely depraved Donnie Azoff. The rest of the cast, like Margot Robbie as Belfort's second wife, Kyle Chandler as the FBI agent investigating Belfort, Jean Dujardin as the Swiss banker who helps Belfort hide his millions, and Jon Bernthal as Belfort's drug-pushing childhood buddy-turned smuggler, the aforementioned Miloti and several other actors all do their share of helping lift the film, but it's ultimately di Caprio's and Hill's show here.
Still, the movie does drag--it's an least half an hour too long--and at several points it definitely sags under its own weight. There's only so much Scorsese, di Caprio and the utterly committed cast and crew can do to carry what is essentially one man's bloated self-aggrandizement, but they really gave it their all, and that's certainly worth something.
The good news for us in the Philippines is this: if a movie like this can make it into mainstream theaters without cuts, I'm fairly convinced ANY movie short of an actual porn film can.
3.5/5
No comments:
Post a Comment