#HOW ACCURATE IS THE WOLF OF WALL STREET MOVIE MOVIE#
( MORE: What The Wolf of Wall Street is Missing: The Women)Īccording to one buzz-generating voice, the problem extends to the choice to make the movie in the first place. (Not that there’s not disagreement on that point too: at Jezebel, that misogyny is seen as a critique too.) “It’s meant to be an exposé of disgusting, immoral, corrupt, obscene behavior,” writes The New Yorker‘s David Denby, “but it’s made in such an exultant style that it becomes an example of disgusting, obscene filmmaking.” Per the Wall Street Journal, “any meaningful perspective on the greedfest of the period is obscured by the gleefulness of the depiction.”Īnd, though the New York Times review acknowledges that “the movie is likely to be the subject of intense scholarly debate” over this question, the film’s portrayal of women as objects decides the question against Scorsese: while depicting rampant misogyny among the movie’s male characters, the filmmaker “is at least a participant-observer” for failing to treat its female characters as much more than playthings for the real people in the story, a storytelling task that’s more crucial than respecting the complexities of a sports car. Variety concurs, criticizing Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter for their failure to bring “any retroactive moralizing to bear” on the source material, which is, after all, a memoir by a man with a specific interest in not taking too close a look at his own actions. TIME’s own Richard Corliss disagrees, calling the movie out for “bathing in amorality until it drowns,” turning crime into comedy by failing to take into account the actual scope of the crimes it portrays. ( MORE: Richard Corliss reviews The Wolf of Wall Street) At Rolling Stone, “Scorsese is jabbing hard at America’s jackpot culture.” Writing at, Matt Zoller Seitz points out that Wolf‘s close attention to the debauchery it portrays “is not the same thing as saying that the film is amoral” and that the directorial choices indicate that Scorsese is “disgusted by this story and these people and finds them grotesque.” Īnd plenty of critics back them up. The Los Angeles Times warns moviegoers that the film will make them hate “those Wall Street high rollers” more than ever. DiCaprio was even more straightforward: “It is an indictment of this world… We don’t like these people, you know what I mean? But we very consciously said, ‘Let’s insulate the audience in the mindset of what these people’s lives were like so we better understand something about the very culture that we live in.'” He used the same word-indicting-to describe the film’s moral stance to Variety. This is something that’s not going to go away if you don’t talk about it,” Scorsese said, adding that the film is, in that way, about human nature and the social structures that facilitate such crimes. And this is on all levels, whether it’s low-level street crime, a white-collar crime and even a crime in religious organizations. “A confidence man takes your trust, takes your confidence and betrays you. Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter over the New Year’s holiday, both Scorsese and his star, Leonardo DiCaprio, came down (unsurprisingly) on the former side, defending the movie. ( MORE: Fact-Checking The Wolf of Wall Street) Which raises a question: aside from whether or not the movie is good, is The Wolf of Wall Street a critique of that culture or a celebration of it? When director Martin Scorsese lingers on the curves of a suit or a car or a nameless woman purchased as casually as another gold watch, is the audience meant to feel their blood boil with anger or race with lust?
Graphic nudity, copious drug use and rampant coarse language are just icing on the cake of fraud, violence and lack of respect for anything that isn’t money. The based-on-a-true-story saga of a Gatsby-esque ’90s stockbroker who rises to extreme wealth via unsavory means has at its heart a man who luxuriates in all that his money can buy, especially all that’s unwholesome.
But cinematic quality isn’t the only thing those who have seen the movie. Follow one thing for critics to disagree about whether a movie is any good, and critical reception for The Wolf of Wall Street has been mixed (the film has a medium-good 75/100 Metascore).