The Wolf of Wall street: When Greed becomes indigestible

In the last ten years, Martin Scorsese served us, an intense biopic Aviator, the stylish, Departed and the most sensitive Hugho. After nearly fifty years of film making one thought, Scorsese was peaking. When you witness works like “The Wolf of Wall Street” you are truly scared. When genius’s like Scorsese can falter, I shudder to think what kind of mistakes mere mortals can commit.

I introspect, on what could have been the tradeoffs, constraints and compulsions to direct a movie which drifts away time and again wondering what the director was trying to achieve.

There is no missing the raw kinetic energy, fueled by irreverence, profane language, indulgence and boundless greed. Greed ceases to be good. Scorsese may have inadvertently driven home the point that Greed is meaningless.

As much as it is the avowed objective of the Indian film directors to perpetually dish out movies based on “God Father” year of after year, year, any Hollywood director worth his salt must have his take on Wall Street.

Is there anything new that we get to hear on Wall Street? Nah!!!! Scorsese does not have to do a rehash of Boiler room sequences. What a free fall?

Jordan Belfort(It has been very difficult remembering the name),  is Scorsese’s Gekko. De Caprio’s presence may well be the redeeming factor of why we may sit through the three hour tale that gets lost time and again. However the writing for Jordan is abysmally bad. There are no shades of Gekko’s ruthlessness. Neither is there anything wolfish about him. There are no dimensions to his personality. Just a plain hedonist and retard.

Supposed to be a Drama, there are no traces of conflict.IN a drama, simple principles of storytelling  demand that there has to be characters who are as powerful as the protagonist with an opposite and equally aggressive point of view. Scorsese could have just taken a leaf out of Amercian gangster to create a character as powerful as Russell Crowe(in AmeriCan Gangster) to take on the like of Jordan Belfort(In The wolf of Wall Steet). I guess there are enough examples in Scorsese’s films himself.

Neither here or there, this middling exercise could be given a miss.

I guess geniuses like Scorsese would be self-critical of their work and redeem themselves with better work the next time around.