The Wolf Of Wall Street (2014)

There are many things to love about Scorsese’s latest ‘epic,’ The Wolf of Wall Street: Matthew McConaughey’s weird and wired broker extolling the virtues of masturbating at least twice a day to reduce stress; Kyle Chandler’s world weary, down-at-heel FBI agent; the endless reams of wiseguy dialogue that seem to say ‘look, Tarantino: this is how it’s really done’; or just the fact that it’s another Scorsese film about gangsters in New York (albeit ‘legalised’ gangsters dealing in penny stock options). But unfortunately there’s a hell of a lot more to hate about this Marty-by-numbers mis-fire.

Put simply, The Wolf of Wall Street is far too much in love with the very subject which it means to parody. Based on the real-life story of Jordan Belfort whose rise to notoriety came about by the aforementioned trade in useless ‘penny stocks’ to people too inexperienced and vulnerable to realise they were being sold a dud.

Only near the beginning of Jordan’s rise do we hear a dissenting voice from his soon to be discarded first wife who poses the question: ‘Wouldn’t you feel better taking money from the rich rather than from poor people?’ It’s a question that answers itself as Belfort proceeds to drug and whore his way up the alpha male ladder, ironically propelled by a negative interview in Forbes. Like a cut-rate Don Corleone jr., he pretends to crave acceptance, yet cannot forsake the life of moronic overindulgence which he and his buddies revel in so graphically. So no, he obviously doesn’t care, which also explains why you get an awful lot of Gordon Gecko-style pep talks about how to succeed in a post-Black Friday dog-eat-dog world of American finance.

The simple ability to sell a man his own pen is seen as a measure of a dealer’s worth in Belfort’s universe of frat-boy excess and conspicuous tastelessness. He is the Anti-Gecko. And while you’re vaguely aware that you are meant to be shaking your head in disapproval as you chuckle at the dumb one-liners and even the slapstick that has replaced Scorsese’s expected template of gruesome violence, you can’t help feeling that the narrative revels in the politically incorrect antics way too much. What is the film trying to tell us? That because the crooks here only con and steal their money via a telephone and good-old American chicanery it’s ok to empathise with the hilarious race for more quaaludes and hookers?

  

The performances here are uniformly excellent. Even Joanna Lumley as his second wife’s former hippie, English aunt, amazes. Jonah Hill as the repulsive Donnie Azoff  (above) especially comes close to eclipsing DiCaprio. And yet while I’m a big fan of Leo (I consider his best work ever to have been for Scorsese in the criminally underrated The Aviator) there’s something a little empty at the heart of this performance beyond the drug-fuelled rants and rather puffy dismay of an addict. The hair dye seems to belie the star's first wrong move in a while. Maybe we needed more of Belfort’s background to really understand the (middle class) man and his motives, but maybe that’s Scorsese’s point: here is a true hero/villain for the ‘90s – hollow behind the bluster. However, you’ll still have trouble forgetting him rolling head first down the steps of his local country club in an attempt to reach his white Ferrari while completely blitzed.

From the first freeze frame, accompanied by the obligatory voiceover, we know we’re in ‘classic’ Scorsese territory. And that’s exactly what’s wrong with this film. It feels like it’s trying too hard to be a Scorsese movie. The fights with the wife, the aforementioned voiceovers, the endless scenes of drug abuse and paranoid phone calls. It’s as if the studio said ‘Marty, we need a film like Casino or Goodfellas, but more up-to-date.’ But the women here have nowhere near the depth that was given to, say, Sharon Stone and the guffaws from all the 20somethings in the preview screening I attended seemed to bear out suspicions that here was a movie cynically designed to be quoted ad-nauseam by young film nerds just as my generation did with Taxi Driver.

I’m sure that Scorsese would say that the emptiness that resides at the heart of Wolf… is merely indicative of the way in which the American dream - broken and twisted by the characters in his previous lengthy elegies to the alternative criminal history of the USA – has now become as moribund and desensitised as the nasal passages of all the coked-up morons who inhabit this film.

But if this were the case then we shouldn’t be expected to laugh quite so much, and for quite so LONG. At three hours this film sacrifices pace for length in an attempt, I guess, to convey some weight. Believe me, by the time you reach the last third the fun really has begun to drag and you long for the inevitable fall from grace for the antihero (which actually doesn’t seem that bad, at all).  You come away feeling a little like you’ve watched a distended version of Animal House or Porkies, where the characters all grew up, and put on suits. The very epitome, perhaps, of Johnson’s dog on hind legs: surprising, but not done well at all.

Django Unchained (2012)

Quentin Tarantino has his peccadilloes and they are, in no particular order: guns, obscure film history (especially those involving martial arts) and dialogue. 

Lots of dialogue. 

If there's a downside to Tarantino's latest, Django Unchained, it's that this verbosity gives a certain flabbiness to the third act - but more of that later. Rest assured, - if you haven't seen Django Unchained yet - it is not only predictably funny (Cf: the hilarious deflation of a proto-KKK lynching scene by a discussion about the inefficiency of eye holes cut into sheets) but it retains and even improves on the way in which, when not wreaking havoc, his characters love to talk.  

Unlike his more art house contemporaries - these characters, while loquacious, are never, ever dull. I'd argue that this is why Tarantino is a great director. Because he revels not just in wordplay but in acting itself. I saw 90-year old Alain Resnais'  lovely You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet this week, and I got the same feeling of respect for the right person to deliver the right lines in the right way. But with QT you get all this AND immense wit with canny sureness of touch, all achieved by using a familiar team of editors, cinematographers and, naturally, actors. Django Unchained has all of this.

And the two perfect actors for this kind of chatty film are Samuel L Jackson and Christoph Waltz, joining Jamie Foxx as the freed slave who wants revenge on his oppressors and his wife (Kerry Washington) returned to his side. Jackson's place in Tarantino's work is 67% assured, if you take into account his appearance in four out of six of his films. And Waltz seared himself into our collective consciousness in the first 15 minutes of Inglourious Basterds. Let's just remind ourselves of that, shall we? This isn't the full scene (unfortunately) - missing the deliciously malevolent charm Waltz exudes when he first arrives. But it does have the pipe bit - which is one of THE funniest moments in cinematic history.

This scene is relevant to Django Unchained because, as pointed out many times, the whole beginning of IB mirrors the opening of another film which is a Tarantino touchstone: Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966). Django Unchained feels like the natural and correct next step for Tarantino - because it's a Western. A spaghetti western. Since Kill Bill he's been referencing Leone and his contemporaries innumerable times, through the use of Morricone scores, editing techniques and framing. At last he can use all that Italian goodness in its correct context.

And while the original trailers for Django Unchained seemed too obvious in its glaring use of music at odds with its subject matter and genre, when you see the film the Jim Croce and hip hop all seems entirely apposite. Mind you, can anyone tell me of another film that reuses another's title music in the same place? It's a bold move, even from a man who paired Gerry Rafferty and ear-slicing. But listen to Rocky Roberts' song from Sergio Corbucci's original Django (1966), and it's clear that it could have been the ONLY choice!

Waltz, as Dr King Schultz - a German dentist-turned-bounty hunter - essentially OWNS this film. So much so that when he (SPOILER ALERT) disappears from the action in the third act the whole film seems to lose impetus. This isn't to say that Jamie Foxx is less than great any time he's on screen, but that Waltz adds a heart to this simple revenge tale. It's a suitable reward for playing such a monster in Tarantino's previous film. He gets to defend Germanic culture as the polar opposite of the brutal culture American slavers and their mock classicist mansions. I loved the part where, racked by his conscience he finally snaps and stops a woman from playing Beethoven badly on the harp.

The overall simplicity of the plot (slave loses girl, slave gets girl back) allows Tarantino to stack up the wordplay even more. But when the director finally makes his cameo (along with Willie Nelson, of all people) as a porky Australian mine employee, it's left to Foxx alone to cajole and finagle before blowing away his captors. Without Waltz's charisma the dialogue seems leaden this far down the line. All we really want by this point is payback. Luckily we get it in gloopy, blood-spattered spades. 

But forget any simplistic squeamishness over the violence portrayed, what QT is doing here is directly related to Leone's 'opera of violence' credo. Again and again Django Unchained goes beyond gratuitousness in its adherence to a tradition that's a key part of American (and world) cinema history. While Django Unchained may not exactly reinvent the Western in the way Leone and Eastwood did it still pans out as a coherent genre piece with all the nods to its predecessors, even down to an appearance by the actor who played the original titular hero, Franco Nero.

There's a certain danger that Tarantino has been locked onto a hipster demographic that belies his talents as a serious director of worth. Conversely, I often see my erm… older friends getting out of their Parker Knolls to shake a virtual fist at QT's shenanigans. (Much has been made of this year's Academy nominations being opened up to a wider, younger demographic by the use of online voting. People seemed appalled by the predominance of white, 50+ males in the list of over 7,000 members eligible to vote. (As a white 50+ male I feel slightly defensive about this. A broad knowledge of more than just recent film history HAS to be a good thing, especially when you consider what happened back in the '80s when BBC Radio One polled listeners for the 'greatest film of all time'. The result was Star Wars. Star Wars! Anyway, we need a reasonable balance of experience versus iconoclasts. What's more, the idea that this aged audience's nostalgia resulted in The Actor winning everything last year seems nonsense to me. It seems more likely that the film was rewarded for box office performance. If the elderly fraternity were just being nostalgic they'd probably go for anything that resembled Mean Streets or Apocalypse Now). But what the establishment (and that includes a lot of you reading this) can't quite fathom is Tarantino's wilful post modernism. In Kill Bill, QT seemed hellbent on showing us exactly HOW many films he'd seen and absorbed, resulting in a jarring mismatch, albeit one that's expertly scripted and never, for one second BORING. Yet QT's last two films show he IS maturing. Which makes his next project - a mooted return to Kill Bill - a little disappointing, to say the least. 

Politically (as with so many other Oscar nominees this year) this is pure post-Obama fodder. But whereas Spielberg's willing to get down and dirty with real history in Lincoln, Tarantino allows himself the freedom to play fast and loose just to get the biggest kick out of portraying sweet revenge on the Antebellum South and its crimes against humanity. Whether this can be seen as good clean fun, or as dumbing down to reach out to the more intellectually challenged of his fans remains to be seen (I do worry that there's a generation of midwesterners who think that Hitler died in a cinema). 

But this is a film, not a history lecture, and ultimately Django Unchained does portray a fair few of the least pleasant aspects of slavery (not to say that it had any plus points at all, unless you count the blues) and even manages to ask some knotty questions; some of which were raised in Inglourious Basterds. Samuel L Jackson as Stephen the head of domestic staff is the equivalent of a Nazi collaborator in occupied France - milking power from oppression - and, as such, is possibly the true evil heart of Django Unchained. Meanwhile it's up to Leonardo DiCaprio (magnificently relishing his part as southern gentleman Calvin Candie, the mandingo-fighting aficionado with a possibly inappropriate attachment to his fawning sister Lara Lee Candie-Fitzwillie, a faded southern belle played by Laura Cayouette) to ask the really key question - why, when they outnumbered their odious masters, did slaves not revolt? 

It's interesting that Tarantino's last three films have seen the director vicariously conquer sexism, anti-semitism and racism while merrily rewriting history. I'm beginning to wonder what's next. A '60s spy thriller pastiche in which Kennedy survives? A sword and sandal epic letting the Trojans get their revenge on the Greeks? Or maybe an MGM-style musical about Florence Nightingale fighting zombies and curing the world of all known diseases?

In the end it matters little, as we know that Django will get his bullet-ridden, explosive revenge and win his Broomhilda back (another typically QT touch here - Django's wife is named by her former German owners, yet the original Brünnhilde is perverted to become the name of a syndicated cartoon witch who made her appearance 100 years after the scope of this film). All the necessary respect is played to the story by leaving us with the leading black characters in triumphant mode, yet what is most important is that Tarantino has turned in a fine Western at last. Considering that we've known all along that he had it in him to do so, it's about time. 

Tyranny and Mutation

A weekend's viewing of both J Edgar - Clint Eastwood's biopic of the FBI's founder, and The Iron Lady - Phyllida Lloyd's look at Grantham's most famous daughter. The link? Two somewhat sympathetic films about notorious right-wingers made by left wing intellectuals.

Writing from the standpoint of someone whose first experience of voting in 1979 was spoiled by the milk snatcher herself taking control of the country, I was already grimly determined that this was not going to be an experience I could stomach. Is my generation doomed to end up as right wing as our parents seemed (well, mine did - they read the Telegraph, and my father, in a rare outburst of political candour, once admitted to an admiration of William Whitelaw - coincidentally the man who stood against Thatcher in the second round of the leadership battle for the Tories in 1978)? Like the tendency to complain about loud music in restaurants and to feel the cold increasingly - are we doomed to gradually go from Red Wedge-supporting yoof to something slightly to the right of Genghis Khan?

Luckily it's not that simple. Both films display a healthy enough grasp of the contradictions at the heart of each story. Politically, there's never a straight black and white divide in great figures' lives. Hoover, for instance, is portrayed as having a racist mother (Judy Dench) but is also known for eliminating the Ku Klux Klan, and his hatred of Martin Luther King seems to stem more from King's moral indiscretions than any colour issues. Thatcher's Darwinian capitalism was espoused by a woman who wholeheartedly supported the decriminalisation of homosexuality, although this isn't mentioned in the film. In fact, as a portrait of the UK's political landscape The Iron Lady is fairly hopeless. I mean, Anthony Head as Geoffrey Howe? John Sessions as Edward Heath?!? Do me a favour…

But balancing this with the avowed intentions of screenwriter du jour, Abi Morgan, this is hardly surprising. Her approach is that of the most interesting form of feminist: one who prefers the macrocosmic to the overarching political landscape; the human over the historical. The most important speech of the film doesn't actually involve Meryl Streep's amazing turn, but features Alexandra Roach as the younger Maggie telling (a very good) Harry Lloyd as Denis that she won't 'die washing tea cups'. This jibe actually has the ring of truthfulness about it. And of course the idea of an Oxford chemistry graduate who then turned to law and politics while simultaneously raising a family is incredible. I have enough trouble making coffee in the morning.

The crux of Morgan's treatment lies in the relationship of daughter Carole (played brilliantly by Olivia Colman) with a mother who's losing it in her twilight years. As Morgan says, 'I have dementia in my own family so I recognised that as an experience and I’d observed it but I do think it’s more of a universal story. I don’t think it’s a political film. I think it’s about the study of power and the isolation of power, but that’s also set against the isolation of old age and in particular, the isolation of dementia, in a way.'

This is all very well, and as such the top and tail of the film are masterful. Yet, ultimately, The Iron Lady is really only half a movie. The portrayal of one woman's descent into dementia is utterly disarming, and ramped up to an incredible level by both La Streep's fabulous portrayal of a woman in her 80s and Jim Broadbent's ever-dependable affability as the hallucinatory conscience Denis, goading her for her weaknesses after a life of toughing it out at the highest levels of government. But when we get onto the typical episodic, biopic approach to the grocer's daughter climb up the greasy pole, things unravel.

As Liz Hoggard points out during her discussion with Peter Lilley, quite a few of the dramatic incidents (ie: poll tax rioters banging on her limo windows etc) never actually occurred. The portrayal of her first day in parliament shows her as a lone female in the House of Commons. While women were very much the minority in 1961 she was far from being alone of her sex. And I certainly found her transformation into some black clad S&M goddess while helping unite Europe (as her compadres plotted her downfall) slightly disturbing. The message seemingly being that her finest moment on the world stage equated to some kind of apotheosis as a sexy witch queen straight out of C S Lewis.

J Edgar on the other hand shows a far surer grasp of both genre and subtext. While Leonardo DiCaprio's performance is every inch the equal of Streep's (IMHO) he doesn't quite pull of the prosthetics so convincingly, although apparently his weight gain (amusingly referred to several times in the film a 'solid weight') was quite real. And Armie Hammer's turn as Hoover's closest ally, Clyde Tolson is plain silly - using a comic tremor and liver spots as shorthand for age. Yet the central premise of a demonised public figure finally brought low by the hands of time is identical. Still, J Edgar displays a far more even hand - balancing significant private facts (the dominance of his mother, his early insecurity which resulted in his (ha) machine gun delivery earning him the nickname 'Speedy', and of course his well-known closeness to Tolson combined with a confirmed batchelor life) with the same episodic approach.

And while, at times, the editing veers close to confusing there are enough clever touches to contextualise the narrative in our present time (cf: J Edgar's first date with Naomi Watts as Helen Gandy; where one can't help feeling that Hoover's display of library card indexing as a precursor to a national criminal database predicts the internet. And did anyone spot the fact that, by the end of the film, Hoover's biographer/confessor had transformed into an Obama lookalike?) But as Tolson tells J Edgar at the end of the movie - barely any of his confessions are true - his supposed presence at the takedown of all those gangsters was PR fluffery designed to net the Bureau a bigger budget, reminding us in canny Citizen Kane style that all reminiscence is untrustworthy.

The leftist principles of both writer and director never let Hoover off the hook: his power games, his confusion of personal drive for moral righteousness: all are dealt with capably and with due respect for a man who, if confused by the hypocrisy of power, also DID help establish modern investigative methods.

Ultimately - J Edgar succeeds not only from having a more experienced director at the helm, but by choosing its subject more cleverly. The film (if you believe the James Ellroy-style rumour mill) could easily have been a scurrilous hatchet job of a hated man's already-twisted reputation. By avoiding the obvious references to conspiracy theories behind JFK's assassination as well as not dwelling too long on his 'private files' (here used as an analogy for his paranoia as well as trust invested in one person - his PA, Ms Gandy), Eastwood manages to pin down the life of a man with few friends and a genuine drive to bring order to post communist USA, despite the odious ways in which he often did it. Also note that they cleverly bypass the legendary rumours of cross-dressing by having J Edgar merely try on his dead mother's dress in a moment of pure grief. There's respect but it's tempered by their unerring even-handedness.

The Iron Lady fails on the same criteria: Morgan's script is a more than competent look at dementia but stumbles when it's attached to a political landscape that's not only more than fresh in my generation's minds but also is attached to someone who is, lest we forget, still very much with us. One can't help but feel that the only reason that this wasn't presented as a analogous fiction (cf: Polanski's The Ghost) was because everyone at the studio knew that Meryl could pull of a brilliant (unnerving?) impersonation of Thatchbag. And for my money the subject of the effects of dementia on an enduring relationship were covered more effectively in Iris (which had... oh, Jim Broadbent as the dependable partner). The inevitable oscar is well-deserved but it doesn't excuse such a brutal subject's rather cavalier treatment. We owe a vast amount of our modern woes to MT's plucky home economics. It's far too early to forget this.