<div class="page side-photo"> <article> <div class="image" style=" background-color:#fff; background-image:url(/uploads/52e68bfb1b6f7.jpg); background-position: 39% 23%; "></div> <div class="container" style="background-color: #fff;"> <header style="font-family: Lora; color: #333333;"> <h1>A LAMB IN WOLF'S CLOTHING </h1> </header> <!-- /header --> <div class="main"> <p class="summary" style="color: #333333;"></p> <p class="byline">Michal Grzadkowski</p> <p><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"></span><span style="font-family: Georgia;">I<span style="font-size: 16px;">n the midst of quaffing wine at my parents’ expense this holiday season, I managed to make it down to the friendly neighbourhood cinema to catch Martin Scorsese’s latest work, Wolf of Wall Street. It was the first time good ol’ Marty let me down.&nbsp;</span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">This wasn’t because I was offended, like so many others, by the glamorous portrayal of a financial fraudster’s lifestyle. Nor was it due to prudishness on my part; after a while one gets accustomed to any barrage of fucks and fucking, no matter how dense. The cinematography was excellent, and the acting superb. What this movie truly lacked was a sense of weight.</span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">What gives weight to a film, and why should we care if Wolf of Wall Street has any? Weight is anything in a movie that elicits an emotional response. It can be developed over the course of a movie, as when characters are developed so that we empathize with them, or in a single well-crafted scene that moves the plot along or provides some sense of resolution. A movie can go only so far on an actor’s charms or a cinematographer’s talents, although to be fair Wolf manages to get quite far indeed. Its shortcomings don’t really become fully visible until the last act, when it reveals itself to be a cinematic lightweight.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">When Jordan Belfort’s evil empire collapses around him, destroying his professional and personal life, we find that we couldn’t care less. Somehow over the course of nearly three hours of running time Scorsese managed to forget to make his movie funny enough to be a farce or moving enough to be tragedy.&nbsp;</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">Instead, it is stuck in the middle, eliciting a chuckle now and again (mostly thanks to prodigious Quaalude consumption), offering brief glimpses into the lives ruined by Belfort’s insatiable appetite for money and sex, and not much else. Filler comes in the form of endless orgies, which may elicit a strong response from Quakers and pre-pubescent males but ultimately fail to make the movie noteworthy in any way. The trick of using voice-over narration from characters both major and minor would have been novel enough to grab one’s attention if it hadn’t already been used, to much greater effect, in other Scorsese films.&nbsp;</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">Wolf of Wall Street is a movie about bad people doing bad things to other bad people. There are no sympathetic characters; when the teeming masses that Belfort is so proficient at duping are finally presented in the last scene, it is in the form of a seminar room full of slack-jawed, dead-eyed yokels. What are we to hang onto then, as viewers? Unless you work in the financial sector the grotesque caricatures presented here don’t exist on any plane relatable to your everyday existence.&nbsp;</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">Other movies have trod this ground, and have trod it much better. Boogie Nights had porn stars and a correspondingly absurd amount of screwing and snorting, but also a cast of characters whose rise and fall was rendered with just enough tawdry vulnerability to make them sympathetic. Spring Breakers, from earlier this year, did its darndest to imprint as much nubile nudity into your eyeballs as it could, but it also evoked an unease, a foreboding, that the relentlessly giddy Wolf so conspicuously lacks.&nbsp;</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Georgia;"><span style="font-size: 16px;">All of this is not to say that you should not see this movie. It is a fine work: the story jumps from debauch to debauch with fantastic abandon, yachts and breasts and designer suits are shot in a gaudy light perfect for the tone. It may yet land Leonardo DiCaprio a long-awaited Oscar win. Nevertheless, Wolf of Wall Street never reaches the soaring heights of previous Scorsese crime biopics such as Casino and GoodFellas. Its readily accessible delights do little other than entertain in the shallowest sense possible. For a provocative or inspiring experience at the movies this winter, one must therefore turn elsewhere.</span></span></p> </div> </div> </article> </div><!-- /page-->