On Sunday I took a trip to my local cinema for a showing of
The Wolf of Wall Street which I’ve been looking forward to seeing since I first
saw the trailer. It wasn’t exactly the way I imagined, but it was excellent. This
is a film about money, women, drugs and deceit; and if you blush easily, you
might struggle to watch it all.
The narrative is based upon the character of Jordan Belfort,
played by Leonardo Dicaprio, a young man craving success and wealth. At the age
of 22 he ends up on Wall Street as a broker, and by 36 he is in jail after swindling
a lot of people out of a lot of money. Having lived for 14 years to the
absolute extreme, you see the effects and it’s quite sad, if not well deserved. It almost has a sleazy and less colourful Baz Lurhman-esque set to it. It is all outrageously over the top but in a drugged up- stripper kind of way, which for me is very different to my usual films.
The film does generally preach misogynistic and anti-feminist
views as women are either portrayed as wives or prostitutes, though the lines
between the two are blurred. Ultimately women are passive objects simply used
for sexual desire within the film. Maybe its Scorsese’s artistic doing or the
way the real Jordan Belford viewed women, but it is just so incredibly taboo! In
particular- Spoiler alert- Jordan Belford (Dicaprio) punches his soon-to-be ex-wife
in the face and in the stomach, and in the theatre you could just hear the
out pour of disgust with a lot of gasps and profanities being launched out in
quick succession. So if you are easily offended by this type of film, maybe
give it a miss as it is a fairly substantial part of the film.
I also need to say that it is a long film. Three hours long
in fact, without trailer time. It really didn’t need to be that long; there were times I thought ‘Oh it’s finishing here, get ready to grab your bag!’ (Might I
add this is around 1 hour 30 into it) but it continued with the ‘Will he? Won’t
he?’ part of the film which just dragged it out and made it feel as though the film had lost momentum.
The Wolf of Wall Street is extravagant, outrageously funny
and fantastically written- I just wished it had been an hour shorter. So yes, I
would see this film again, but it would not be a film to watch the parents.
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