"The Wolf Of Wall Street" Opened Today

It's another Scorsese-DiCaprio project-- there have been 5 so far-- so there has been plenty of fanfare. Based on the true story of Wall Street swindler Jordan Belfort, anyone who had hoped the movie-- or the discussion around it-- would serve as an opportunity to take a serious look at Wall Street corruption will be sorely disappointed. It's as if Scorsese made a conscious effort to avoid it, and left out-- like 100% left out-- the ties between the Republican Party and the breathtaking Belfort scandals. There was no Senator Alfonse D'Amato character in the movie taking bribes. And you would never guess that to try to get the FBI off his back in the early '90s, Belfort paid the RNC a cool $100,000 in one shot. The RNC gobbled up the swindled cash and used it to take over the House in 1994 and install Newt Gingrich.

I saw the film at a screening two weeks ago. I'm not telling Scorsese how to make a successful film but he sure could have done the country some good by sticking to the facts that showed, as graphically as the endless sex scenes, how Wall Street predators are incapable of moderating their behavior-- and how they pose unacceptable dangers for society.

"Anything goes" was the guiding ethos for Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio in making their extravagant dark comedy of Wall Street excess, The Wolf of Wall Street.

"We would look at each other and ask, 'Are we going too far?"' says DiCaprio. Rarely was the answer "yes."

The two longtime collaborators pushed the based-on-a-true-story tale to the limits of outrageousness, decency and MPAA approval. With pinstripe suits instead of togas, it's their Satyricon, their Caligula: a nearly three-hour-long orgy of money, sex and drugs.

The partnership between the 71-year-old Scorsese and DiCaprio, 39, has now stretched over five films and more than a dozen years. They've together been able to carve out a space for the kind of daring Hollywood typically shuns. "Anything goes" is far from the mantra of today's movie business.

"I don't think people really quite understand how unique this movie is," says DiCaprio, while Scorsese, sitting next to him, nods. "No matter what they think of the movie, you do not see films like this happening."

...The Wolf of Wall Street, written by Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire), is adapted from Jordan Belfort's memoir about his heady rise from a Long Island penny stock trader to a wealthy stock swindler presiding over the brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont.

Schooled by an early boss (Matthew McConaughey) on the "fairy dust" that is high finance, Belfort recklessly plunders his clients' pockets to make himself rich and to finance a parade of prostitutes, cocaine and Quaaludes. DiCaprio calls the movie "a biography of a scumbag."

"It has to be seen. It has to be experienced," says Scorsese. "If it raises the ire of some people, that might be a good thing because it makes you think about it."

Though DiCaprio has spent much of his post-Titanic career taking on iconic, somewhat stiff roles like J. Edgar Hoover, Jay Gatsby and Howard Hughes, his performance as Belfort is wildly uninhibited-- more like he was in Woody Allen's Celebrity. In scenes in front of hundreds of cheering extras playing sycophant employees, DiCaprio identified with Belfort's swelling ego. He felt, he says, "like a rock star."

"Jordan's character had been brewing in me for a while," says DiCaprio. "I had been thinking about this for six years, so I knew something was going to come out. Some beast was going to come out. I just didn't know what it was going to be."

"He was enjoying himself with the character," says Scorsese. "I didn't want to stand back and say, 'This is bad behaviour.' It's not for us to say, it's for us to present. And obviously it's bad behaviour."

It would have been even more reflective of "bad behavior" had Scorsese not whitewashed out the political corruption that is so inherent to Wall Street's financial corruption. Worse, I haven't seen a single review that even mentions D'Amat's and the RNC's bribe-taking from Belfort. Another lost opportunity. Today MTV's review played up "Sex, drugs, money, and corruption," but stuck to the script rather than the reality it was based on. Most of the reviews were insipid, commercial and entirely superficial. There's lots of fretting over the 3 hour length and no discussion of Belfort's political bribery. Not even the newspaper with the readership most interested in politics, the Washington Post bothers to point out what Scorsese decided to leave out of his narrative. Christopher Orr in his review for The Atlantic couldn't wait to "be clear from the outset: The Wolf of Wall Street is not a 'scathing indictment of capitalism run amok' or a 'cautionary fable for our time' or any of the comparable high-minded plaudits that are likely to be thrown its way." Except no other reviewers that I've seen went anywhere in that direction. Instead, every single one of them handled it exactly the way Orr did. I don't think I saw one review that didn't come straight from the film publicity department's p.r. material.