Film review: The Wolf of Wall Street
Despite the moralistic comeuppance at the end, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is almost destined to drive more youngsters into the stockbroking game than ever before. Forget “Greed is good.” For the 20-something multimillionaire whose rise and fall is at the center of the action, satisfying his manifold addictions is good, and it is all he cares about.
It’s been a rough two decades for Scorsese. Since the 1990 release of GoodFellas, whose Copacabana tracking shot inspired a generation of film students, his films have never again had the same kind of value in terms of either entertainment of artistry. Sure, there was Casino and Bringing Out the Dead, while The Aviator and The Departed in the mid-2000s signaled a resurgence of seriousness after the freewheeling mess of Gangs of New York, but then came the laughably psychedelic thriller Shutter Island. His latest film may just be the best he has made since the fall of the Iron Curtain.
The structure of The Wolf of Wall Street closely follows that of GoodFellas, complete with first-person voiceover, the occasional breaking of the fourth wall, and an in media res opening that precedes the rest of the rags-to-riches tale told mostly in linear fashion. Both films are based on true stories of guys who let power get to their heads and ended up in prison for their deeds, and both main characters became addicted to drugs, having made their living doing different things that were just as illegal.
To read the full review, visit The Prague Post. The Wolf of Wall Street is currently on wide release in Bulgaria.
(Still of Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street. Photo by Mary Cybulski – © 2013 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.)
