Recent Watching: The Wolf of Wall Street

Last night I watched the 2013 Martin Scorsese movie the Wolf of Wall Street.

Richard Brody has a recent article in the New Yorker titled "The Best Movie Performances of the Century So Far." He names Leonardo DiCaprio's part in The Wolf of Wall Street as the best.

DiCaprio is the most paradoxical of actors. A star since he was a teen-ager, he built his career around his charisma and his gift for mimicry; in most of his early performances, he seemed to be impersonating a movie star, and slipped frictionlessly into his roles as if they were costumes, regardless of the physical difficulty they involved. With “The Wolf of Wall Street,” he finally achieved his cinematic apotheosis. In the role of Jordan Belfort, a super-salesman and super-con-man whose hedonistic will to power is one with his consuming fury, DiCaprio seemed to tap deep into himself, even if in the way of mere fantasy and exuberant disinhibition. He so heatedly embraced the role’s excesses that they stuck to him; he flung himself so hard at its artifices that he shattered them and came through as more himself than he had ever been onscreen; he and his art finally met.

Let me draw your attention to the scene in the clip below, which might be titled Lemon Quaaludes. In this scene Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) has taken some quaaludes about 90 minutes earlier, and the drugs start to affect him in the middle of his phone call. All Belfort needs to down is walk down the stairs, get in his car, and drive, less than one mile, back to his house. 

However, the drugs have impacted Belfort's ability to even complete the most basic of motor functions. He can not walk, but he can crawl. The whole thing is played like some sort of comedy that might have been done in the silent era by Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, or Charlie Chaplin. It takes a brave actor to be willing to humiliate himself like this to stay in character. One other thing to note about the stair scene -- there are six stairs in one shot and at least 16 in another shot of the same stairs. This changing the number of stairs to achieve an effect is something that, I believe, Scorsese borrowed from Alfred Hitchcock.

After Belfort finally manages to drive home, the scene is still not done. Belfort and his friend Donny (Jonah Hill) have an epic argument and fight. But since they are both on drugs, neither one of them says anything comprehensible. And neither one of them has enough brain-motor function to even walk.

I invite you to take a look and enjoy.