The Wolf of Wall Street

In The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese treats the world of high finance in turn as frat house, college bowl halftime show, and lost episode of Jackass. Cocaine has replaced coffee as the upper of choice in the hyper-masculine halls of commerce, and power lunches apparently break into atavistic grunt-songs with such regularity that the other restaurant patrons barely even glance up from their steaks. Drawing upon the life of Jordan Belfort—a fallen financial wunderkind who scammed around $200 million out of investors—Scorsese turns real-world fraud into fodder for darkly comic absurdity. From a Quaalude-addled Belfort straining to crawl into his Lamborghini to a boardroom full of financiers discussing the fine print of their midget rental contract, the film zips from one gonzo setup to another with a lupine speed that belies its three-hour running time. Yet the film returns to the same few notes again and again, with volume the only variety to be found (your options are loud or louder). It seems excess is excessive, and apparently the idea must be embodied if it is to be conveyed. You might as well say a good war film is supposed to shoot the audience in the face.

Viewers may feel similarly blasted by Scorsese and crew once the credits start to roll. The film saves its final rebuke not for the guy convicted of money laundering, but rather the $40K-a-year types greedily dreaming up ways to meet their mortgage payments. Never mind the millionaires—the problem is that the schmucks in the crowd trusted the wrong wealthy elite to run the show. After all, if the system can bestow fame and good fortune upon the likes of Scorcese and Leonardo Dicaprio—estimated net worths of $70 million and $200 million, respectively—then surely it can’t be all that bad, can it? In fact, this apparent assault on corporate avarice and depravity is so devastating that its putative target feels comfortable making a cameo; Dicaprio even returned the favour and filmed a promo for Belfort’s motivational speaking business. But why shouldn’t Belfort happily appear in the film? Movie deals are good cash, and he has bills to pay like anyone else: $100 for groceries here, $90 million in restitution fees there. In the film, a negative article in Forbes only feeds the man’s fame and appeal. One can only imagine the spin-off benefits of being subjected to three-hours of supposedly scathing cinematic mockery.

Hugo

Poised somewhere between PSA and love letter, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is at least one or two steps above those tedious hurray-for-film montages that pad out the Oscar broadcast each year. Granted, it still succumbs to many of the traps of latter-day Scorsese (bloated running time, art direction as crutch, a general mawkishness), even as it avoids others (Leonardo Dicaprio). But unlike those pious Oscar montages—and the dreary potboilers Scorsese has been churning out lately—there is some genuine passion to be found here in the exuberant homages to classic cinema. Now if only Scorsese could direct some of that fervour for cinematic history into the films he churns out today with such dutiful, mechanical efficiency.

Ostensibly about an orphan living in a Parisian train station in the 1930s, Hugo actually spends much of its time constructing a loving fantasy around film pioneer George Melies. Scorsese seems energized by the chance to share his enthusiasm for film history with modern audiences, and the summaries of Melies’ life and the early days of cinema are buoyant and breathless, complete with wondrous scenes of the old director at work. One can only imagine Scorsese’s glee at introducing countless children (and a few adults as well, no doubt) to such canonical cinematic images as Harold Lloyd dangling from a clock, or the man in the moon with a rocket stuck in his eye. The handicraft world of Melies remains beguiling to this day, a merging of theatre, magic and cinema so vibrant and unique it still dazzles from its bygone era. Unfortunately, the comparison does little to flatter Scorsese’s film, which for all its charm, feels finally drab and limited—3-D effects and CGI tricks are poor substitutes for a bit of cardboard and some homespun magic.

Inception

Lo and behold, it’s the last original idea in Hollywood—tread carefully, lest this rare beast become startled and disappear back into the smog from whence it came. As a rare big-budget film that is neither a sequel nor based upon an old television show, Inception earns a lot of good will right from the start. True, Christopher Nolan’s story of dream thieves trying to plant an idea in the mind of the heir to a giant business empire is completely convoluted, but I’m just happy to see a blockbuster that taxes my brain and not just my senses. Too bad the film totally squanders charismatic performers like Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt on expository sidekick roles and features Leo DiCaprio doing his typical sad-sack tortured husband routine (better than Shutter Island, for what little that’s worth). It’s an intriguing dream, yet it fades too quickly once you wake up.

Only a supremely disciplined and organized mind could hold together Inception’s complex dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream narrative, but rationality can be a bit of a liability when dealing with the subconscious. Save for a few bursts of ostentatious special effects—a street folds on top of itself, a series of Parisian shops explode in slow motion—the dreamscapes are mostly just generic action-movie set pieces, each feeling like another level in some videogame (I’m pretty sure I already played this snow level in Modern Warfare 2). The film’s excuse is that these are collective dreams, designed by an architect and then dreamt by another. They’re meant to be generic, because anything too unique or weird draws the attention of the dreamer’s subconscious—here represented by an impersonal horde of everyday people that descend upon intruders with the implacable violence of a zombie mob. Show a bit of ingenuity and the crowd is likely to turn on you. Too much personality, too much creativity is dangerous in these blockbuster dreams. And if that is Nolan’s view of the audience and his role as an architect of dreams, is it really surprising that he should build such an elaborate labyrinth of a film to hide within?