The Wolf of Wall Street

With the average Agitation of the Mind review clocking in at 800 – 1,000 words, it would be easy enough to expend that much verbiage discussing what’s wrong with ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’. Let’s be honest: it’s a far from perfect film. The three-hour running time is in no way justified, Jonah Hill’s performance is borderline terrible, and the editing veers from merely functional to appalling amateurish. Scorsese’s editor is, of course, Thelma Schoonmaker, a woman whose contribution to the great man’s canon is immeasurable. To watch some scenes in ‘Wolf’ and pondered that they were put together by the same person who gave ‘Goodfellas’ is rat-a-tat-tat narrative energy is a very depressing thing indeed.

While we’re talking about the editing, there’s probably a trade paper article to be written on how badly the park bench scene between Leonardo di Caprio and Joanna Lumley is put together, and how it does great disservice to the bizarre pleasure of seeing those two actors in the same scene. Not, however, that it’s a particularly good scene. Like many scenes in the film, it simply goes on too long. And don’t even get me started on the scene on the yacht with the FBI guys …

But to write that review of ‘Wolf’ would be to (a) deviate from the mission statement of this blog, and (b) miss the point. Because ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ is exactly the kind of film you didn’t think Scorsese made anymore: a full-throttle, frequently exhilarating rollercoaster through the lives of thoroughly amoral characters that doesn’t care if you like them, loathe them, want to be like them or are so thoroughly outraged you exit the cinema and write a strongly worded letter to the Sunday papers.

There’s a dynamic that Scorsese has keyed into which distinguishes the high points of his career, and it’s worth bearing in mind that he almost went into the seminary as a young man. Martin Scorsese is a profoundly moral filmmaker who inherently and empathetically understands the lure of amorality. It’s no coincidence that ‘Wolf’ plays out like ‘Goodfellas: The Stockbroker Years’. The same rise and fall narrative applies to both: protagonist at formative age is dazzled by a certain lifestyle; protagonist hungrily embraces said lifestyle; protagonist spirals out of control, destroying the lives of those around him; protagonist falls afoul of criminal investigation; protagonist rats out his so-called partners in crime to save own skin.

Essentially, the only difference between ‘Goodfellas’ and ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ is that stakes are lower and the running time is longer. Oh, and stokebrokers use phones where gangsters use guns. Otherwise, it’s the same retinue of drugs, booze, hookers and a commitment to foul language that would make a Russian sailor blush. That Scorsese plunders his own playbook so determinedly is both a strength and a weakness. A strength in that ‘Wolf’ is Scorsese’s most energised and propulsive outing since ‘The Aviator’, and a weakness in that we’re seeing absolutely nothing new.

But still, it’s a blast. For every scene that drags (an attempted bribe of an FBI officer is so laboriously established that it squanders all of its dramatic possibility after five minutes and then stumbles on interminably for as long again), there’s a sequence that’s joyous to watch and utterly hilarious in its irreverence and inappropriateness. Witness Jordan Belfort (di Caprio) driving out to his country club to use a payphone after he finds his home and office have been wiretapped. A batch of out-of-date ludes he’d ingested earlier and written off as duds kick in plus VAT and, as a voiceover that’s beautifully at odds with what we’re seeing on screen muses, he goes from “that tingly feeling to cerebral palsy in one step”. What follows is several minutes of absurd physical comedy (ever wondered what di Caprio doing a Jim Carrey impersonation would look like? wonder no more), a hyperkinetic argument between two people who have lost the power of coherent speech, an example of the Heimlich manoeuvre/CPR that’s unlikely to gain St John’s Ambulance endorsement, and a DUI version of ‘Rashomon’. Like an 18-rated Morecambe & Wise sketch, the longer it goes on the funnier it gets.

‘Wolf’ works best when Scorsese serves up the material as black comedy. His characters are such an affront to, well, everything that an entirely serious take on the story would be so steeped in moral outrage as to be unwatchable. Ergo, a marital argument between Belfort and second wife Naomi (a stunning, in both senses of the word, Margot Robbie) during which Naomi repeatedly storms out of their bedroom, not for dramatic emphasis but to refill a glass of water in the en suite bathroom for purposes of chucking in Belfort’s face. Think of any of the bust-ups between Henry and Karen in ‘Goodfellas’ filtered through the Three Stooges.

Equally good value for money are Rob Reiner as Belfort’s short-fuse father, and Matthew McConaughey (in a truly disturbing fright-wig) as Belfort’s erstwhile mentor. The casting of Jonah Hill, as I may have insinuated earlier, is less successful. It’s as if audience familiarity with his douchey persona in puerile comedies is being relied upon to create a character rather than, y’know, acting and characterisation.

But then ‘Wolf’ isn’t interested in subtleties. In fact, with its lovingly detailed minutiae of naked hookers and dwarf-tossing, it’s about as unsubtle a film as you’re likely to encounter. Belfort rhapsodizes about month-end debauchery at his offices when the profits are announced and Scorsese brings it to life in fetishistic details. I’ll say this for the guy, though: he stages a sexier and more exuberant orgy than Tinto Brass. The exuberance of ‘Wolf’, the sheer delight in its most non-PC moments, is its greatest strength. At the end of ‘Goodfellas’, Henry Hill complains that his has to live like a regular guy, a shmuck, and paradoxically such a minor quibble compared to jail or a retributive hit almost seems the greater punishment. At the end of ‘Wolf’, Belfort has learned nothing. As a condemnation of a certain mindset that’s all too frequently conflated with the American dream, it almost justifies three hours in his company. Almost.

Django Unchained

Where the hell do you start with a review of ‘Django Unchained’?

Do you outright ’fess up that it’s not perfect, that there are some flaws, then shrug your shoulders during a paragraph break and spend the rest of the review blathering on about how much you enjoyed it anyway?

Do you start out by enthusing about the many things that Tarantino gets right, then slowly peel back a few critical layers, saving the nit-picking for last?

Do you mourn the untimely loss of Sally Menke, whose contribution to the cinema of Tarantino is thrown into acute context by the occasionally indecisive editing rhythms of ‘Django Unchained’ that you just know wouldn’t have been there if she’d been in the editing room?

What you don’t do is start throwing around words like “self-indulgent”, “homage” and “no original ideas”, because – damn it! – Tarantino’s is the cinema of the cineaste, a synthesis of all the movies that most of us will never get round to seeing, and there are plenty of us who wouldn’t have it any other way. Complaining about self-indulgence in a Tarantino film is like tutting over the horror in James Herbert novel. It’s kind of the fucking point.

And it’s for this reason that any and every Tarantino film births itself across the screen in the amniotic fluids of movie lore. Thus ‘Inglourious Basterds’ emerges as more than just a revisionist “bunch of guys on a mission” movie if you approach it with, say, some foreknowledge of the UFA protégés who fled Germany during the rise of Nazism. And ‘Django Unchained’ ticks a lot more boxes if you know your Sergio Leone from your Sergio Corbucci. The very title, and a cameo by Franco Nero, riff on Corbucci’s most celebrate spaghetti western.

While ‘Django Unchained’ is most firmly rooted in the spaghetti western tradition – it’s OTT, often nihilistically violent, and utterly divorced from the moral cadences of the more traditional American western – it has to be noted that whereas Tarantino adheres to the iconography of the genre, he doesn’t necessarily hold to its conventions. Granted, I’m all in favour of artists being unconventional, but the western is one of those genres that benefits from a more conventional aesthetic.

To use a sweeping – but, I hope, justified – generalisation, westerns tell essentially simple stories. Even films as thematically deep as Peckinpah’s ‘Ride the High Country’ and ‘The Wild Bunch’ or Eastwood’s ‘Unforgiven’ have simple narratives. The greatest westerns are distillations of theme and character: haiku in widescreen and with six-shooters. ‘Django Unchained’ is anything but narratively simple; anything but a distillation. The script is a circuitous affair that rambles into ever greater contrivances in order to thread a veritable posse of genre touchstones into something resembling an actual story.

These range from aforementioned spaghetti western maestros Leone and Corbucci to the blaxploitation ‘Nigger Charley’ films by way of Mel Brooks’s ‘Blazing Saddles’ and, uh, Richard Fleischer’s ‘Mandingo’. It’s this latter – a slice of overboiled Suth’un melodrama – that informs the second half of Tarantino’s film and calls for the largest quota of narrative convolutions. ‘Mandingo’ is a curious touchstone for Tarantino, since the film trades on the sweaty physical violence of bare-knuckle fighting correlated with the sweaty forbidden lure of interracial sex.

Central to ‘Mandingo’ is sex. Central to Tarantino’s ‘Mandingo’ homage is fighting. ‘Django Unchained’ is typical of all of Tarantino’s work in that it is a sexless work of cinema. For all that Django (Jamie Foxx)’s quest is to free his enslaved wife (Kerry Washington) from an outwardly charming but cruel and hypocritical plantation owner, every frame suggests the mindset of a director who is a hopeless (possibly unrequited) romantic – nowhere more explicitly than in the already divisive final scene – rather than the interactions of two characters who enjoy sexual intimacy.

On the plus side, though, ‘Django Unchained’ represents as well as anything in Tarantino’s filmography the two reasons I will always have time for him as a filmmaker: he cares – cares deeply – about dialogue and performance. The dialogue might not have the crackle and immediate quotability of ‘Reservoir Dogs’ or ‘Pulp Fiction’, but that’s only because Tarantino is writing in a different idiom. And when he’s writing for his big villain, Calvin Candie (Leonardo di Caprio), Tarantino fashions dialogue that captures the character’s suavity, venality and egoism and wraps it into a simultaneously seductive and repellent package. Di Caprio’s performance rises to the occasion. Elsewhere, Samuel L Jackson essays a complex and dangerous character in a turn that’s his best in years, while Christoph Waltz, as German dentist-turned-bounty-hunter Dr King Schulz, makes it two-for-two following his star-making turn in ‘Inglourious Basterds’. Foxx meanwhile is all moody cool, iconography in motion, his vengeful anti-hero growing in stature as the film progresses.

Best of all, the whole cast – including some left-of-field cameos (when was the last time you saw ‘Dukes of Hazard’ regular Tom Wopat in anything?) – are obviously in on the joke. Sure, ‘Django Unchained’ is wincingly violent in places, and Tarantino makes no bones that slavery was a fucking awful business, but there’s nothing to say that the heaviest and headiest subjects can’t be tackled provocatively and/or satirically. No pun intended, but I really can’t think of another way to put it: ‘Django Unchained’ works best as a black comedy.

Shutter Island

Ever had a movie spoiled for you? I mean the ending completely and utterly blown?

In descending order of both recency and annoyance, I present three examples:

3) Twenty years ago, my aunt was watching ‘Dances With Wolves’ when some stumbling inebriate came lurching into the cinema, a good hour and a half into the film, and stood swaying in the aisle, blinking myopically as he focussed on the screen. “Oh yeah,” he slurred, “seen this. Wolf gets shot.” And blundered back out.

2) Ten years ago, a mate of mine was driving to the cinema to see ‘The Sixth Sense’ – actually frickin’ en route – and listening to the car radio when a blabbermouth DJ gave the ending away.

1) Last year, the day before I was planning to go and see ‘Shutter Island’, I read an online review whose author didn’t have the common decency to throw up a spoiler alert. Moreover, the way this doofus painted the ending, it sounded like the kind of movie I’d feel conned by and get annoyed at. So I stayed away. There’s something downright fucking unholy about being made to feel that you need to stay away from a Martin Scorsese film.

A few weeks ago, I felt that enough time had passed and added it to my rental list. The DVD turned up over the weekend. On Monday evening, fortified by half a bottle of wine, I sat down to watch it.

Damn, I wish I’d seen it at the cinema!

Granted, ‘Shutter Island’ isn’t perfect – at nearly two and a half hours it’s overlong and its revelatory final act threatens to drown the drama in exposition – but as an exercise in one of the modern masters of mainstream cinema basically fucking with the audience, it’s as audacious as it is pulpy. Even if Scorsese hadn’t namechecked Val Lewton as an influence, there’d be no doubt that ‘Shutter Island’ is his second sortie into schlock, his biggest and boldest battering at the barricades of the B-movie since Max Cady strode tattooed and unreformed from jail in ‘Cape Fear’ and promised that “you will learn about loss”.

In ‘Shutter Island’, US Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo diCaprio) learns about –

And here, ladies and gentlemen, is as good a place as any to ensure I don’t do unto others as was done unto me. In other words: SPOILER ALERT. I say again: SPOILER ALERT. And for a third time, just to make sure nobody holds anything against me: SPOILER ALERT.

In ‘Shutter Island’, US Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo diCaprio) learns about himself. About his past. About why his dreams are rendered into nightmare by memories of his dead wife Dolores (Michelle Williams). He learns why he doesn’t really know anything about his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) prior to their assignation to track down an escaped mental patient on the Alcatraz-like clinical facility of the title. He learns why his painful memories of the liberation of Auschwitz and inextricably bound up with the present, why he is so fixated on the whereabouts of deranged arsonist Andrew Laeddis (Elias Koteas), and what the cryptic note left by the enigmatic Rachel Solando (played in two incarnations by Emily Mortimer and Patricia Clarkson) truly means.

The dual casting of Mortimer and Clarkson is genius. Both have a fragile beauty, a visceral intelligence and a quixotic combination of vulnerability and steely resolve. The two Rachels, for me, are the key to the film. ‘Shutter Island’ is a study in duality. In Teddy’s mind, the facility gets mixed up with the death camps; his wife with one of the inmates; the head of security with a Nazi officer. The facility’s senior management seems to exist under a similar schism. Who is really in charge, the suave but persuasive Dr Cawley (Ben Kingsley) or the authoritarian Dr Naehring (Max von Sydow)? Teddy’s dreams – vividly depicted in some of the film’s most challenging visual tableaux – centre around fire and ash, yet his fear of water is what opens the floodgates (pardon the pun) to the narrative’s nastiest resolution.

Having seen the film only in the context of knowing its ending, I’d like to hazard a guess that like, say, Dario Argento’s ‘Deep Red’, it’s a work that becomes infinitely more rewarding – certainly a film that reveals itself as subversively multi-faceted – once you know what to look for. The opening scene, depicting Teddy and Chuck’s ferry crossing to the island, initially comes across as shoddily edited, all weird cuts, spatial dislocations and shots that clearly don’t match. In hindsight, it’s cinematic sleight of hand, a woozy syncopation that throws the viewer out of normalcy and into a state of mind.

Scorsese perpetuates the tactic right up until the final act: gothic imagery abounds, apocalyptic storms lash the island, the agonies of Mahler are seared into the soundtrack, paranoia bleeds into the fabric of the film, conspiracies ooze out of the woodwork and the stone walls, identities are incrementally challenged, reality and madness dance a dizzying pas de deux around each other, and the lunatics – in more than one chillingly effective set-piece – seem ready to take over the asylum.

In one respect, ‘Shutter Island’ is an almost-masterpiece of psychological portraiture; in another its pure shlock. The viewer willing to let go and just experience the head-fuck will find something reasonably close to the best of both worlds. For a work of such aesthetic artifice, ‘Shutter Island’ is pure cinema. It embodies a dichotomy and damn near resolves it.

To the doofus whose review I mentioned earlier, thank you for giving me the tools by which to fully appreciate ‘Shutter Island’ on first viewing. And screw you that I didn’t go see it on the big screen.

The Aviator

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: biopics / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 65 of 100

While there is plenty to love about ‘Gangs of New York’ – the vast sets, the awesome opening sequence, Daniel Day Lewis in excelsis – it suffers from Leonardo di Caprio’s central performance. I still identified him back then as the floppy-haired romantic lead (albeit with a handful of interesting indie turns in his filmography) whose poster was di rigueur on the walls of teenage girls the world over. In ‘Gangs of New York’, he didn’t have the physicality, didn’t have the threat. His was a role that the younger de Niro would have torn into. For that reason, ‘Gangs’ never quite achieved what I wanted it to – the status of late-period Scorsese masterpiece that I’d been waiting for over a decade.

When ‘The Aviator’ was released, I approached it warily. It was an inherited project – Scorsese had only intended to produce, with Michael Mann calling the shots; Mann, however, decided he didn’t want to make another biopic so soon after ‘Ali’ and Scorsese took the helm – and it reunited the director with di Caprio. I was blown away. Sure, there are some minor quibbles (it’s slightly overlong, the CGI during the flight of the “Spruce Goose” is a bit wobbly), but ‘The Aviator’ has energy, visual opulence and a to-die-for cast pulling out all the stops.

Di Caprio’s portrayal of Howard Hughes completely sold me on him as an actor and he just seems to have gone from strength to strength since. Cate Blanchett is fantastic as Katherine Hepburn (I love the way Scorsese shapes some of her scenes, such as the banter on the golf course or the rat-a-tat-tat dialogue around the dinner table, as homages to Hepburn’s own movies), while Kate Beckinsale pulls off a sexy, sultry, don’t-mess-with-me approximation of Ava Gardner. Rounding out the cast are such luminaries as John C. Reilly, Alan Alda, Danny Huston, Alec Baldwin, Jude Law, Frances Conroy and always excellent Ian Holm, one of my personal favourite actors. There’s even a cameo from No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani as Jean Harlow – she doesn’t do much, but she nails Harlow’s look perfectly.

Scorsese handles the long running time (a shade over two and three quarter hours) masterfully, structuring the first third as an exhilarating immersion into the world of Hughes’ key obsessions – aircraft, movies, women – and seducing the audience with his charisma and playboy lifestyle. This stage of the movie contains most of the spectacular flying sequences, culminating in the mechanical failure and devastating crash of a test plane that Hughes insists on piloting himself. The middle stretch is heralded by aftermath of the crash. Things go wrong for Hughes: he loses Hepburn; his relationship with Gardner turns into a miasma of jealousy and suspicion; senate hearings coincide with his deteriorating mental state and increasingly obsessive and reclusive behaviour. The final third charts Hughes’s hermit-like withdrawal from the world; his phobia of dirt, germs and human contact. Things are almost redeemed when he emerges to pilot the “Spruce Goose”, his most ambitious undertaking in the field of avionics, but history is waiting to write it up as a magnificent folly.

‘The Aviator’ is full-tilt filmmaking, often flamboyant and indulgent, but also intuitively attuned to character moments and not afraid to follow its subject into his darkest times. Scorsese eschews the mannered, plodding, heavily expository approach that typifies many biopics. He maintains focus and a linear through-line without ever sacrificing narrative drive, pacing or the audience’s attention span. If all biopics were this good, I probably wouldn’t be so reticent about the genre.

Inception

There’s a recording of ‘Mack the Knife’ where Frank Sinatra deviates from Brecht and Weill’s tale of white gloves, jack-knives and blood flowing in scarlet ribbons, and goes into a fantasia on all the other singers who have stamped their personality on the song:

Old Satchmo, Louie Armstrong, Bobby Darin

They did this song nice, Lady Ella too
They all sang it with so much feeling
That ol’ Blue Eyes, he ain’t gonna add nothing new

This is kind of how I feel about reviewing ‘Inception’. Is there anyone on the blogosphere (or at least that region of the blogosphere occupied by writers on film) who hasn’t written about ‘Inception’ yet? Is there a single review out there not weighted down by a comments section wherein rages debate on the implications of that already infamous final shot?

Is there anyone who doesn’t know that the film is about dream hacker named Cobb (Leonardo diCaprio) who is hired by a businessman to implant an idea in the mind of a rival? That the first half details how Cobb puts his team together and the second details their (mis)adventures in the dream state when their carefully delineated plan goes awry after their victim’s subconscious proves a little more resistant to their machinations than expected?

Is there anyone who hasn’t sung the praises of Nolan’s audacity in the set piece involving a van plunging from a bridge in the kind of slow motion that makes Peckinpah look like a speed demon? Who hasn’t marvelled at the intercutting between this and two other extraordinarily orchestrated set pieces which play out simultaneously in different levels of the dreamscape and across different lengths of time? Who hasn’t been impressed by how efficiently Nolan sets up the rules of this world of the imagination and plays scrupulously fair by them?

Have I missed any reviews that haven’t acknowledged how heavily the dialogue errs towards the expositional and remarked upon the heavy-handedness of some of the character names? (Cases in point: Ellen Page’s dream architect Ariadne, introduced in a scene where Cobb asks her to design a maze. Or Marion Cotillard’s Mal, the fact that the actress is French ramming home what the name translates as.) Have any of these reviews not written these tendencies off in the final analysis, minor quibbles compared to how goddamned entertaining, audaciously executed and beautifully shot the whole thing is? (Wally Pfister, Nolan’s regular DoP is worthy to be spoken of alongside Roger Deakins and Christopher Doyle.)

Is there anything in ‘Inception’ that isn’t absolutely flawless, from the often breath-taking visual effects and mise-en-scene (a train barrelling out of nowhere down a city street; an unblemished city of mind filled with the oddest little details; a street bending over and folding in on itself) to the uniformly excellent performance: diCaprio is as good as he’s ever been; Joseph Gordon-Levitt revisits his cerebral/cynical persona from ‘Brick’ but underpinned here with a streak of badass; Ellen Page graduates from the quirky, borderline annoying teenie of earlier roles and her intelligence shines through fiercely; Tom Hardy, unrecognisable from ‘Bronson’, camps it up to hilarious effect; Cillian Murphy, so often cast in cold or villainous roles, imbues the film with a wounded humanity; Marion Cotillard is sultry, dangerous and seductive and I for one wouldn’t have it any other way; Ken Watanabe imbues what could have been a plot function role with real gravitas; and Michael Caine, in what is essentially a cameo, proves that he’s Christopher Nolan’s good luck charm plus VAT.

In fact, the only problem with ‘Inception’ is that it’s almost too polished and accomplished. There’s none of the unpredictably that Heath Ledger’s magnificently reinvented Joker brings to ‘The Dark Knight’, crashing through Batman’s clearly defined moral rectitude and sending the movie spinning off in unexpected directions. Nor, despite the levels of the dream state and the brilliant construction of the climactic set piece(s), is the structure quite as clever or effective as that of ‘The Prestige’. Indeed, the last shot of ‘Inception’ seems almost manufactured in its ambiguity compared to the gradual and thought-provoking way in which ‘The Prestige’ slowly and slyly reveals its secrets.

None of which should detract from the fact that ‘Inception’ is one hell of a good movie. Seven films into his career and Nolan has yet to disappoint. ‘Inception’ might not be the absolute touched-by-genius best thing on his CV (that honour, as far as I’m concerned, still goes to ‘The Prestige’), but evaluated for what, after all, it is­ – ie. a big-budget tentpole studio release – it sets the bar arguably higher than any mainstream director currently at work.