The film is based on Belfort’s 2003 memoir of the same name and takes on a boastful tone as Belfort, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, narrates his cocaine-fueled, sex-saturated tale of outrageous wealth, replete with strippers, yachts, Quaalude popping, and an endless parade of bare boobs. For those who missed it, WoWS recounts the true-ish exploits of Jordan Belfort, a stock broker from Queens who founded the firm Stratton Oakmont and amassed a fortune in the 90s through fraud, money laundering, stock manipulations, and other sundried cons, crimes for which he served jail time in the early 2000s. A successor to Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995), the film and its characters have inspired comparison to Gordon Gekko, Machiavelli, Caligula, The Great Gatsby, Jerry Lewis, and Richard III. WoWS is a 180-minute epic of drugs, sex, and money, a bacchanal to shame Dionysus, a paean to excess and extravagance that seeks at every turn to outdo itself. This fervor and disparity makes sense if ever there were a film to respond strongly to, it’s this one. Writing for the same publication, David Denby, in the best review I’ve read of the film, calls it “monotonous in the way that all burlesque becomes monotonous after a while.” Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal “couldn't wait for the hollow spectacle to end.” Internet film criticism magnate Matt Zoller Seitz “could imagine watching these cackling swine for five hours, or ten, while still finding them fascinating.” The New Yorker’s Richard Brody named it the best film of 2013, wrote two articles about it (“ The Wild, Brilliant Wolf of Wall Street” and “ The Lasting Power of Wolf of Wall Street”), praising the film as Scorsese’s best and nothing less than one of cinema’s great masterworks, lavishing on it a level of adulation nearly as extravagant as the film itself (he manages to describe it as “Olympian” in both articles). Nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, the film has also garnered an ardent posse of detractors who declaim the film’s amorality and decadence. The film has made - and topped - numerous “Best of 2013” lists and enjoys a 76% positive rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. The Wolf of Wall Street // Philip ConklinĬritical and popular reaction to The Wolf of Wall Street has been wide-ranging and passionate, by turns rhapsodic and malicious.
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