‘Wolf Of Wall Street’ Makes A Raucous Debut

Oscars: Scorsese And DiCaprio Back In The Race As ‘Wolf Of Wall Street’ Makes A Raucous Debut

The last shoe to drop in the 2013 awards race dropped Saturday as Martin Scorsese’s much-awaited The Wolf Of Wall Street was unveiled to SAG voters at a couple of screenings at the WGA theatre in Beverly Hills. I caught the film earlier at a small 10am screening for some of the cast members on the Paramount lot and then moderated the Q-and-A following the 6:30pm screening of the 3 hour film . To say it was rapturously received would be an understatement. DiCaprio received a standing ovation when I introduced him, and just before that  co-star Jonah Hill also won huge applause from the packed-to-the-rafters house who also enthusiastically cheered co-stars Rob Reiner (who plays DiCaprio’s dad and stole the show at the Q-and-A) , Jon Favreau, P.J. Byrne, Ken Choi and Cristin  Milioti. I heard the film also received the same kind of enthusiastic response at the earlier screening too. Paramount also threw a party to kick things off in style. Celebration was in order since Paramount at one time wasn’t even sure the film would be ready as Scorsese has been editing  to make a 2013 date.  Originally it was scheduled for a November 15 release  but moved to Christmas bumping Jack Ryan : Shadow Recruit into January to make room for the wide release awards run of Wolf.

 

Formal reviews are embargoed but as an initial observation I would label the movie  “Scorsese Satyricon” , a wild ride full of contemporary debauchery to say the least (DiCaprio compared some of it to Caligula) , with a fine ensemble and a frenetic pace that belies its three hour running time. And even at that length it never lags. It is the perfect companion piece to Goodfellas and puts Scorsese right back in the thick of the Oscar race, if Academy members, particularly older ones, can deal with the almost non-stop parade of sex , drugs, nudity and rock and roll.  Violence, a Scorsese staple in this type of film, is missing but there are a number of remarkable set pieces including a storm-driven yacht voyage that has to be seen to be believed (Rob Legato supervised the Special Effects team). An NC-17 was avoided by some reported judicious cutting  but its hard to imagine the stuff that didn’t make it in considering the edgy material that did.

 

There are also the performances, including two sure to gain Oscar recognition for Di Caprio and Hill. As many observers I talked to noted DiCaprio in fact has simply never been better in the signature role of his career as Jordan Belfort , the out-of-control Wall Street hot shot who is at the center of this story. Leo just knocked someone out of the Best Actor lineup making an impossibly difficult year even more difficult. It would be unthinkable to imagine he won’t be in the top five.  And Hill, hilarious and memorable as his co-hort in white collar crime is equally great, an almost certain second Best Supporting Actor nod for the actor who was first nominated opposite Brad Pitt in Moneyball. The incredible thing about it all is it’s supposedly all true. This story from Belfort’s book about his rise and fall in the financial world is almost hard to believe but apparently it happened and that should give us all pause. It certainly explains why the economy tanked and we went down with the ship.

 

At age 71 Scorsese is rare among directors at that age, clearly at the top of his directorial powers. He seems energized by the material and the script from Terence Winter. It is a perfect companion to films like Goodfellas and Casino. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has deemed it a comedy for the Golden Globes and I guess that seems right. These guys are hilarious, if tragic. Whatever the label it is a movie that won’t be easy to ignore even as it comes out at the tail end of the season on December 25th. Paramount tells me they are getting it seen by most critics groups in time (though screeners won’t be out  by those deadlines)  and will be anxious to see the reaction. Despite its length it seems commercial to me and also contains distinct , if limited , turns by the likes of Oscar winner Jean Dujardin  and especially Matthew McConaughey , terrific in one brilliantly funny scene as the stock wizard who sets DiCaprio’s Belfort out on the course to self-destruction (incredibly Belfort’s first day as a stock broker was the 1987 day the market crashed). Of particular note among the women is Australian actress Margot Robbie who nails the second very New York wife of Belfort

 

“It’s all true. That’s what is so fascinating about the novel. That’s why I was so obsessed with playing this character. It was  a seven year process to get this film made. The financing kept falling apart. ..It was a very difficult film to finance. It’s like the Roman Empire in the 80′s. It’s debaucherous , it was sex and drugs and greed. It wasn’t the most commercial sounding film but Marty’s attitude was always ‘let’s focus on this being a really dark comedy’ and as he said before he intended Goodfellas to be a comedy,”  he said adding that he pursued Scorsese consistently  to do this movie with him. “I told him after the Golden Globes one night ‘ we have to do this movie. We don’t get opportunities like this ever. These opportunities like this don’t come about . We have to do this movie.”

Di Caprio said he spent many months working with Belfort to take him to the specific moments of his life which he helped bring to the screen, a rare experience for an actor and that is what clearly helped make the role pay off as well as it does. “It’s like the fall of the Roman Empire. You just can’t believe this man lived this life. This is kind of a microcosm of a much bigger story. They are kind of an outsider beating on Wall Street’s door. These guys are out in a chop shop in Long Island trying to emulate Gordan Gekko. They want to be these guys they admire. And Jordan found a tiny loophole and just kept pushing it further and further and the money took over and the women , and the drugs and pretty soon he was in over his head,” he said.

It’s also interesting that Scorsese cast three directors in straight acting roles including Spike Jonze, Jon Favreau and Rob Reiner who got big laughs when he said, “if you get a director who can also act a little bit, then for the director making the film it makes it a little easier because we know what they are going through. We aren’t going to be a pain in the ass. ‘You know in this scene, what’s my motivation? Fuck your motivation. Just say the fucking words!’

Hill said, “I saw it today, this morning  for the first time and it’s taken until now to digest what I saw. Martin Scorsese is my favorite artist in the world and to get to play that kind of character in this kind of film, this is the ultimate dream of my life,” he said while also hilariously describing an instant movie classic scene involving taking ludes with Di Caprio and another in which he swallows a live goldfish.

Paramount threw a party afterwards in the lobby based on the wild one in the movie and . also like in the movie, hired a marching band to play during the festivities.  Understandably, with killer competition getting a head start out there, the studio wants to do everything it can to say The Wolf Of Wall Street has arrived and staked a place in the race.

Indeed it has.

If you like Scorsese, laughs, drugs, sex/nudity or money. (All of the above?) then Wolf of Wall Street is for you. #goodfellasNwallstreet
— Kurt Long (@kurtlong) December 1, 2013

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Are Leonardo DiCaprio and 'The Wolf of Wall Street' just what this Oscar season needed?

Martin Scorsese's dark comedy finally screens and it could take the edge off

By Kristopher Tapley

It's been quite the somber season in some ways: slavery and racial tension, piracy and health care, dementia-addled fathers and embittered folk crooners. Even the year's biggest spectacle achievement, Alfonso Cuarón's "Gravity," ultimately takes its weightless heroine to weighty moments of emotion and catharsis (not that we're complaining). It almost feels like what the 2013 film awards season needs is a nice prestige-level dose of the outrageous, something bonkers, something to take the edge off. And Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street" is here to answer the call.

The film isn't set to screen for the press at large for another week, but this weekend it began making its way through guild screenings, where plus ones and crossover memberships with critics and the film commentariat are just unavoidable. So it was Saturday afternoon that I made my way to the first of two SAG screenings of this absolutely unrepentant entry (hopefully that caveat saves the studio some disgruntled phone calls — over 100 people were turned away from the two screenings, which were filled to the brim). Stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Rob Reiner, Cristina Milioti, Jon Favreau, P.J. Byrne and Kenneth Choi were on hand to discuss working with a master filmmaker and the life and times of a man, Jordan Belfort, who by anyone's measure should probably be dead by now.

As first reported by In Contention, Scorsese's latest found itself tied up in the editing room and on the verge of blowing past an originally-planned Nov. 15 release back in September. It eventually did just that and soon re-calibrated its sights for Christmas Day. The director chopped and whittled a massive first cut down to a, well, still-massive 179 minutes, and that's what we're left with: three sensational hours of unbound, naughty (nearly NC-17), bleak comedy that immediately registers as a different sort of contender this season. Someone described it to me a few weeks ago as "Marty on methamphetamine," and I'm not going to argue with that. Though maybe "Marty on quaaludes" is more apt. I'll get to that…

During the Q-and-A, DiCaprio — who also produced the film and received a standing ovation from the guild members in attendance — talked about how when he first read Belfort's memoir, the debauchery was so outrageous that he was eager to develop it as a film. "To me it was like a modern-day 'Caligula,'" he said. "The story is out-of-this-world. You can't believe it happened."

But while it was all set to be his and Scorsese's fifth collaboration right after "Shutter Island," DiCaprio said the financing fell through because the studio balked at some of the more salacious elements of the story. Indeed, the film narrowly avoided an NC-17 rating (which Scorsese liked the idea of releasing in a "Midnight Cowboy" sort of way, a source told me some time ago). But even as the director went off to do "Hugo" and the actor moved on to projects like "J. Edgar" and "The Great Gatsby," DiCaprio couldn't envision the material in another filmmaker's hands.

"I really couldn't get Marty out of my mind," DiCaprio said. "He's somebody that's able to sort of encapsulate the underworld with such authenticity and bring such humor to these characters. I mean, 'Goodfellas' was supposed to be a comedy, he told me. This was tailor-made for him."

Enter film financiers Red Granite, who came in and told DiCaprio and Scorsese not to hold anything back and to push the envelope as far as they possibly could. "I said to Marty, 'We just don't get opportunities like this, ever, in this industry,'" DiCaprio said. "'People do not give you the freedom that these guys want to give us and the budget to make this an epic tale, so we have to take this opportunity.' Thankfully he agreed, and that's what you just saw up on the screen."

At The Weinstein Company's Golden Globes after-party last season, DiCaprio told me in no uncertain terms that he felt his performance in "Wolf" was his best work to date. Not quite, I would argue, but it's absolutely up there as the commitment to the insanity is hugely impressive. One quaalude-driven experience in particular functions in the film almost as a "mini-movie," as the star put it, giving DiCaprio the opportunity to be quite physical with his work as his character suffers through what must have been one of the worst highs anyone ever experienced. The actor said for him it brought to mind the extended "meatballs and helicopters" sequence at the end of "Goodfellas."

Reiner, who was seeing the film for the first time Saturday, took a moment to mention that particular scene as well. "That is one of the funniest set pieces I've ever seen in a movie," he said. "You get nervous when you haven't seen the film because you've got to do a thing with a Q-and-A, and what if it stunk? Then you're in trouble. Well, luckily, it was the reverse of stunk. It was really good. I knew it had laughs but I didn't realize how many laughs."

To that point, the film more than earns its "dark comedy" stripes. Much of that hilarity falls on the shoulders of Jonah Hill, who was also seeing the finished product for the first time and received a big pop from the audience when introduced for the Q-and-A. He carries the comedy like a champ throughout, delivering, easily, his best performance to date as a version of investment banker Danny Porush.

Without the cooperation of the real Porush, whose surname was changed to Azoff in the film, Hill had to lean on the well of information provided by the real Belfort. "Any time I play someone real in a movie, they ask to have their name changed," Hill said, referencing his Oscar-nominated work in "Moneyball." The actor was intrigued by the fact that Belfort, who has a small cameo toward the end of "Wolf," would rattle off the litany of despicable things he's done but that "he would never judge himself." But for his part, Scorsese kept his distance from Belfort, DiCaprio said, "because he wanted to be able to have a different perspective." DiCaprio and Hill would then serve as middle men, bringing new material and stories not necessarily documented in the book to the director's attention.

And there were so many stories it was dizzying. One of them, in fact, featuring "German Shepherds and blow jobs in Vegas," according to DiCaprio, was far too scandalous to make it to the screen. "It was so bad I wish I never heard it," Hill said. Cue your imaginations. But that's the kind of outrageousness that was the name of the game here, an almost mercurial sort of spirit that Scorsese even wanted to infuse with the performances.

"It was sort of controlled, calculated chaos," DiCaprio said, noting that he looked into the making of "The King of Comedy" because of the amount of improvisation that went into that 1983 Scorsese film. "And he wanted it to be like that, specifically. He wanted all the actors to have a loose sort of feeling in their performance. It's the first film I did with Marty in the sense that there weren't all these moving puzzle pieces that had to culminate in a powerful ending. This was the story of a man's life, and an insane one at that. So that was his intent, to let it sort of spiral off into madness."

The film's shenanigans therefore play out for a minute shy of three hours, and in many ways, it feels like a film that wants to be longer. Nearly two hours were lopped off during the editing process, but it's the kind of thing that either needed to be an hour shorter (for the potency of, say, "Goodfellas") or a full-blown mini-series (because Belfort's story certainly has the material and the intrigue to sustain that length) to strike the perfect balance. Structure issues start to plague a film this long (particularly a comedy), caught between being a jab and a roundhouse. But it's an epic yarn no matter how you slice it.

And Favreau — who has maybe 60 seconds of screen time in the film — perhaps put it best, mentioning Scorsese's ability to drive out nuanced and subtle performances despite how over-the-top the circumstances of the narrative may be. "It never loses its sense of grounding, and I think that's a hallmark of Scorsese's work," he said. "And as you guys who have seen 'Swingers' know, I've been really fixated on this guy since my earliest moments. So to be a fly on the wall, it was very intimidating, but it was quite an honor."

We'll dive deeper into "The Wolf of Wall Street" in due time, including its Oscar potential, which, I don't mind saying, seems like a bit of a mixed bag, though reaction so far has been hugely enthusiastic. Hill is a great bet for Best Supporting Actor and DiCaprio could frankly nudge someone out of that seemingly locked-up Best Actor race. If she had a few more scenes, it seems to me that Margot Robbie (who will nevertheless be a star after this film comes out) could have pushed into the Best Supporting Actress race, but I'm not so sure beyond that. We'll see how the rest of this week's guild screenings go.

More on all of that in Monday's Oscar column.

"The Wolf of Wall Street" arrives in theaters on Christmas Day.

Scorsese’s ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ Gets In Under the Oscar Wire

* IMHO, the battle for Oscar Best Picture should be between GRAVITY and 12 YEARS A SLAVE with the latter taking the statue home.

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