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"Enter Steve Madden - pond scum no more, " Donnie knows as the ads of anorexic girls with bobble heads and clunky, square-toed footwear become the firm's "golden ticket." Jonah Hill gives it his all and a new face to 'dishonorable' as Donnie, schoolfriend of shoe designer Steve Madden (Jake Hoffman). In order to avoid what could be dealt with, he becomes a ruthless swine whose main goal is to have other people debase themselves around him. "65% chance the kids could have been retarded," he says, foregoing political correctness, winking at Belfort through his "horn-rimmed clear glasses, to look more waspy". He wants to swallow his new boss up completely with his ferocious appetite to escape the shame of his own life's actuality as an overweight repressed man who married his first cousin and has two children with her. Riches, cocaine, prostitutes, Quaaludes in total excess become the four pillars of his longing to be like Belfort, or to be Belfort. When he first approaches Belfort in a diner, because they live in the same apartment building and he covets the neighbor's car, Donnie wears a pastel wanna be preppy shirt that visually quarters his upper body. In comes Jonah Hill as side-kick Donnie Azoff, a most dangerous creature in this morally bankrupt world. Jonze's smile and moustache resemble his hero in Her. Dwight, the boss, played beautifully and sheepishly by Spike Jonze, explains the world of pink sheets and pennystocks. An investment center resembling the pooling of the bureaucratic branches of a funeral home with a horse-betting place, gives him a job. In a rundown mall on Long Island, the education of Jordan Belfort continues. The trading floor survival kit consists of cocaine and martinis, "two every five minutes, till one of us passes out," because nothing in this world of finance is real, "fairy dust," because "we don't build anything." McConaughey grimaces, pokes intensity ascending, banging his chest, "you got to stay relaxed, man." Belfort nibbles on an olive - the deal with the devil made with a song.īelfort has a wife, "Theresa, who cuts hair" (played by Cristin Milioti), and his first day as a stock broker, Black Monday, October19, 1987, Wall Street experiences the biggest plummet since 1929. At lunch in a restaurant overlooking the city from on high, Hanna bangs his chest and sings a war-chant improvised by McConaughey which made it into the film. Matthew McConaughey embodies Mark Hanna, who shows the young Belfort the rules of the game as his boss in the first firm he works for. There haven't been many memory losses as chillingly effective since Arthur Ripley's The Chase (1946) - that I can recall. The destroyer's slant is alluring in some over-the-top sequences and never more frightening than when we wake up with him after a remarkably drug-induced night to a reality that has nothing to do with the pictures we had just seen. Whereas Streep's Violet Weston's path of destruction is watched from the outside - we are her dinner guests, get close to her children, understand her husband's inkling for committing suicide - Scorsese handcuffs us to DiCaprio's Belfort. The perspectives the films' directors chose are at opposite ends of the spectrum. The two most jaw-dropping pill addicts this holiday season are played by DiCaprio here and Meryl Streep in John Wells's August: Osage County.
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All is blurred because the pursuit of more wealth and more drugs and more women to degrade does not go with a clear head. Without mercy he piles shouting on top of shouting. Nothing changes, Scorsese does not budge. They target the pleasures of immediate gratification. The lion that walks through a busy Wall Street office, and the sidewalks below, passing bulls and bears, in a commercial for Belfort's company that promises integrity and pride, takes these qualities with him in the first minutes of the film and leaves us in the company of wolves. The excesses with drugs and sex are fueled by the urge to humiliate - others and the self.
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In the course of the film, based on the real (convicted felon) Belfort's memoir, nothing is going to be considered worth saving, least of all wildlife. "You can save the goddamned Spotted Owl," he continues, which could be read as a sly aside about DiCaprio's important work in the protection of wildlife. "Money makes you a better person," proffers Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort into the camera right at the start. No Katharine Hepburn descendant in spirit gets a foot in Martin Scorsese's spectacular morality play The Wolf Of Wall Street. More Casino than The Aviator, the women are given their strength through trickery.