High finance

A white-collar criminal from a blue-collar background with a monstrous appetite for red light commodities, broker/entrepreneur-turned-ex-con/motivational speaker Jordan Belfort is nothing if not colourful—he’s positively gaudy. Had he not authored two memoirs, his tabloid-epic life story would surely seem too preposterous/libellous to translate into credible based-on-a-true-story cinema. It’s only sensible that The Wolf of Wall Street opens with teasers of high-stakes dwarf tossing and an inebriated helicopter ride; we need a taste of what high-flying lowbrow transgressions the next three hours have in store.

Scripted by Boardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter, directed by Martin Scorsese, and featuring a name ensemble cast fronted by Leonardo DiCaprio, it’s difficult to think of another film combining such appalling behaviour with such A-list pedigree that’s played, above all, for grotesque, balls-out, amoral entertainment. That so much of The Wolf of Wall Street is actually entertaining is some kind of feat: its characters are hard to care about, its narrative is baggy, its star can be as tedious as he is admirably shameless, and its septuagenarian director seems both on his game and off his rocker. Riddled with continuity errors, lacking a consistently coherent chronology, and intermittently oblivious as to what constitutes the heart of a scene, Wolf is one of the generally meticulous Scorsese’s sloppiest works. Maybe he was having too much fun. The upshot is that the fun is onscreen, pulsing, like a raw nerve jacked up.

Anyone familiar with Scorsese’s large canvas rise-and-fall epics of rabid American ambition will feel perfectly oriented within Wolf’s adrenalized storytelling strategies. The disaffected voice-over, equal parts confession and braggadocio; the rock connoisseur’s soundtrack; the injection of freeze-frames or slow-motion into frenetic montages offering guided tours of the given milieu: we’ve been here before. But a pleasing thing about Wolf is that its tone echoes The King of Comedy almost as much as Goodfellas or Casino. What drives Belfort isn’t just greed, hubris or spite—he’s a showman! (Again, Belfort’s already written two memoirs—he’s only 51.) Wolf is about performance, incorporating hi-jinx with slapstick, mirth with mayhem. Once his brokerage/penny stock boiler room, Stratton Oakmont, is rocketing toward millionaire mega-success (and multiple counts of fraud), Belfort gives daily, drug-addled pep talks to his colleagues—mostly thugs he came up with in Queens—rocking the mic like a rowdy wrestler or stand-up comic. He hires show-hookers, marching bands, and, as promised, tossable dwarves. One of Wolf’s most absurd sequences finds Belfort and his business partner Donnie (Jonah Hill) ODing on Quaaludes to the point of near-catatonia and getting into a wrestling match involving a phone chord that needs to be seen to be believed. Stratton Oakmont was too much an outlier to serve as a stand-in for finance sector fraudulence in general, so don’t think of Wolf as social commentary except in the broadest sense. This is, above all, busy, teeth-grindingly giddy high wire comedy.

On that note, I have to single out Hill, Wolf’s own king of comedy. A paragon of the supporting actor, Hill deftly gauges DiCaprio’s gradations of hysteria at every turn and devises the best possible manner of matching it. There’s a brilliant early scene where he explains how he came to marry his cousin, and another where he introduces Belfort to crack cocaine. Only 30 (as of today, in fact), Hill is only gradually revealing his range and abilities. Between this and Moneyball, you start to wonder if the kid can do anything. Of course, over the course of Wolf’s taboo-thrashing carnival show, you’ll see him and DiCaprio do just about everything. That might be worth the ticket price and protracted run-time alone. 

                  

Inception: Leave the dreaming to us

They move through cities that fold in on themselves, that resemble immense cemeteries, that erode into seas; through zero-gravity hotel corridors, across bridges, between skyscrapers, over arctic tundra, and into hidden chambers. The protagonists in Christopher Nolan’s Inception are in many ways your archetypical assemblage of criminal experts convening for the perfect heist, speaking in action movie boilerplate, wearing nifty duds, yet here the crime unfolds not in some bustling metropolis but rather in the vast and intricate dream worlds of the mark… or is it the dream of the criminal? If everyone’s sharing the same dream, can the dream “belong” to only one of the dreamers? While we try to sort this all out we can marvel at the scenery. The worlds within worlds invoked here are overwhelmingly impressive in terms of scale. Nolan, a great craftsman, has been given the resources to dream, and he dreams very, very big. I’m not sure he dreams very deep.

Master infiltrator Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is normally hired to extract information from the dreams he burgles, but a vaguely sinister, unfathomably affluent new client (Ken Watanabe) wants Cobb instead to plant information in his target’s unconscious mind. The goal is to penetrate the dreams of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the son of a dying industrialist, and convince him to divvy up dad’s monopoly. Cobb has something ugly in his past—like all Nolan’s protagonists, he’s so ridden with guilt it’s turning toxic—and remuneration includes his hassle-free passage home to the US, where he’s a wanted man, so Cobb accepts, introducing the one-last-gig trope into Inception’s genre touchstones. Cobb gathers his cohorts: the supporting ensemble includes an unusually stuffy Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bronson’s charismatic and dexterous Tom Hardy, Ellen Page, giving by far the film’s most natural performance, and Dileep Rao, that annoying magical guy from Drag Me to Hell. Gradually the group’s adventure becomes less about messing with Fischer’s business sense than it does staving off Cobb’s inner demons. Cobb’s been rattled by dream-encounters with his hysterical wife (Marion Cotillard), or at least his memory of her, with increasing frequency. He’s apparently in danger of slipping into this permanent, gray matter-draining REM state forever. Or, you know, something really bad, anyway.

Much time is spent establishing the rules of psychic corporate espionage—the unspecified injections used to plunge participants deep enough into sleep, the mental tricks required to navigate one’s way through another’s dreams without getting lost, the necessity of a dream architect, a sort of production designer of the future—though much of how this business really fails or functions is nonetheless left pretty sketchy. Nolan seems more concerned with the idea of inner logic than he does in its actual exploration. Still, there are enough intriguing details—the reliance on personal totems to ground the dreamers, such as Cobb’s tiny metal top, being chief among them—to satisfy one’s sense of having entered a world with some reasonably consistent chains of cause and effect, and the final scene, a cliffhanger of sorts, works to the film’s overall strengths.

More distracting is the sheer aneurotic, humourless tidiness of Nolan’s dream worlds, which bear little resemblance to the amorphous, murky, slippery dreams most of us experience, places far more vividly and idiosyncratically realized by filmmakers like David Cronenberg, Luis Buñuel, David Lynch, Richard Linklater, or Andrei Tarkovsky, a key influence on Inception’s morbid love story. The realms Inception traverses feel closer to some science fiction novelist’s notion of virtual reality than they do to the places we visit in out sleep. But if these realms fail to resonate as a reflection of our dreams at least they provide terrain for an unusually fantastical crime thriller, one which revels in elegantly edited set pieces that each fit snugly into their respective slots in the writer-director’s intricate stratagem. Inception is an exhausting film—and I actually think it kind of needs to be—and is more problematic the more you think about it. It’s also easily the most stimulating spectacle movie you’ll find on the menu this summer.

Road to nowhere

April thought she and Frank must be extraordinary, that they would surely lead extraordinary lives, but then April got pregnant, Frank took an office job, and they bought themselves a house deep in the suburbs, where a second child emerged as alarmingly as the first. Before you know it, it’s 1955, and Frank’s 30. He’s having a liquid lunch, commiserating with some seducable innocent from the secretarial pool over how he found himself embedded in such mediocrity. He comes home on his birthday, and April, as though under some intoxicating spell, tells him they’re going to sell the house and car. They’re going to go to Paris, that place that so dazzled Frank when he passed through during the war. There’s still time for them to be extraordinary.

But of course, there isn’t. Happiness and fulfillment are less than fleeting in Revolutionary Road. They’re abstractions, something we never catch glimpse of, even in traces. The first three minutes of the movie sweep us from April and Frank’s first encounter to bracingly resentful, belligerent arguments on the side of the freeway. We start in neatly designed domestic despair and pretty much stay there, which is to say that director Sam Mendes’ latest film, an adaptation of Richard Yates’ 1961 eponymous novel, stuck with theatrical, histrionic, dated sounding talk—the script’s by Justin Haythe—makes a companion to Mendes’ breakthrough, American Beauty, which was also rife with neatly designed domestic despair, yet offered flashes of revelation. Even in the crucial scene in which April and Frank resolve to start anew in Europe, there isn’t a single flashing moment of revelation here, no dreamy thrill or sense of connection between them. Nor is there any such moment when they inevitably decide not to go, no relief or resignation, no mourning for opportunities lost or delayed. These scenes, rendered at times in handsome close-ups that do little to help the dearth of chemistry, just die up there on the screen, as the movie slowly sucks the life out of us all.

What is genuinely extraordinary in Revolutionary Road is Kate Winslet’s performance, newly crowned with a Golden Globe. Her April wanted to be an actor, and there she is, acting up a storm every day of her drab life, folding napkins, making supper, cleaning the drapes, playing the role of dutiful wife. Winslet keeps a current of electricity flowing through her better scenes. She’s almost scary, sad, yet sexy, in the one where she’s abandoned at a roadhouse with a fawning neighbour. She gets drunk, and, overwhelmed with angst, looks up at him and suddenly, with a comically grave expression, says, “Come on, let’s do it.” When she's later pinned by this neighbour in the front seat of a car, the way she holds her body rigid is itself interesting and unnerving to watch. April has sex twice in this film, each time lasting all of 30 seconds, and the disappointment registers on Winslet's face in an odd way that keeps you watching and wondering about what exactly is building up inside of her, rather than having her inner landscape all splayed out to mourn over. Before we reach the hysterical climax, Winslet's is a harrowing presence.

Fine actor though he is, Leonardo DiCaprio by contrast gives one of his most fraught performances. His Frank is basically an average guy in way over his head. He's no match for April in more ways than one. There’s a brilliantly gauged scene where Frank meets with a potential new employer for lunch, and DiCaprio’s pent-up frustration, that tension held in his jaw and forehead, makes it all too clear how Frank, for all his talk about his lousy job, realizes that he might be really good at it. And that he kinda likes that. And that maybe that's right where he belongs. Just about everywhere else in Revolutionary Road however, DiCaprio squints, gesticulates and shouts to excess, unable to spend a single moment on screen with a neutral expression. A moment of repose could tell us so much here, letting us catch the character off guard instead of bracing vaguely for a new attack. So DiCaprio flails in uncertainty, yet I can’t completely hold it against him. The material, which indeed devastates, presses too tightly up against the actors, positively stifling them. And Mendes’ approach seems so decided from the start, so obviously superior to the milieu depicted. So in the end I suppose DiCaprio’s rather like Frank: he simply never had a chance.