The Wolf of Wall Street (**1/2)

Martin Scorsese would seem to be the ideal person to tell the story of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo de Caprio). In movies like Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and The Aviator, he’s told stories of morally compromised men clawing their way to the top, often to be brought down by their enemies, or by their own flaws. Belfort, whose memoir was a basis for the film, was a New York stockbroker. Right in the opening voiceover, Belfort tells us about the drugs he takes, the prostitutes he sleeps with (five a week!), and the laws he breaks. Then we flash back to 1987, where, on his very first day of work, the younger version of Belfort (who looks the same as the older version) is taken out to lunch by his boss (Matthew McConaughey). The boss tells him two things: first, the goal is not to help clients, but to earn commissions; second, Jordan should masturbate more. Virtually every character in this movie is like this. No one pretends to have ethics, or inhibitions. Everyone curses, to the point where it seems unnatural. But the market is about to crash, and soon Belfort is out of a job.

So he settles for selling penny stocks out of an office on Long Island. An early scene has him, overdressed in a slick suit, delivering a silver-tongued stream of bullshit that leaves his motley coworkers slack-jawed, his target begging to invest, and, I think, the moviegoer quite entertained. Already, however, the rest of the story — the formation of his own brokerage, the wealth that quickly follows, the big house, the expensive car, the cheating (in every sense) — can be anticipated. As a character, Belfort is nearly fully formed. Unlike, say, Goodfellas, the plot moves quickly from struggle to excess. With a dorky-looking Jonah Hill as his equally amoral second-in-command, he trains a small army of white males to deliver similar spiels to the wealthy. Cue montages of vulgarity-laden speeches, strippers in the office, etc. Only vague threats of an FBI investigation and, one presumes, STDs, threaten conflict. The movie is also different from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, still probably the most famous movie about the financial industry, although at one point another character compares Belfort to Wall Street’s anti-hero, Gordon Gekko. Gekko, of course, is famous for the line, “Greed is good.” One gets the feeling here than Belfort has not even thought about the question. In his cinematic incarnation, he is a man of drive and desire, and nothing more.

What makes Gekko into an archetype is not simply saying it, but meaning it. We see how he justifies what others see as villainy. I think every powerful person needs such an internal justification. Without that element, this story feels empty. Certainly, Scorsese tells it with panache, and he and screenwriter Terence Winter, whose credits include numerous episodes of Boardwalk Empire and The Sopranos, give the movie a lighter, more comedic tone than I’d expected. I would almost call the movie a comedy, except that it’s three hours, and it’s not funny for three hours. (The comedic centerpiece, in which Belfort battles some vintage Quaaludes, is a ten-minute sequence that’s funny for five.) When Belfort has a worthy adversary, like the FBI agent played by Kyle Chandler, or, in a couple of scenes, his wife (Margot Robbie), it’s at its best. But, as for the rest, even if there’s no one better at depicting vulgar, misogynistic excess than Scorsese, the excess is…excessive.

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viewed 1/2/14 6:30 pm and posted 1/7/14

J. Edgar (***)

J. Edgar Hoover served the United States Department of Justice for over 50 years, the last 48 (1924–1972) as head of what was called simply the Bureau of Investigation when he joined. So it’s a daunting task to sum up that career in a two-hour film, as director Clint Eastwood and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Milk) have tried to do.

Hoover may be better remembered today for clashing with Bobby Kennedy and trying to discredit Martin Luther King in the 1960s, or for his long relationship with his assistant, Clyde Tolson. But he also created the modern FBI and brought a professionalism to the task of catching criminals, even as the methods he sanctioned stirred controversies that reverberate in these days of warrantless wiretaps and detention without trial. Black and Eastwood devote considerable time to the anti-communist Palmer raids, which made Hoover’s name, and to the Lindbergh kidnapping, which, when solved, solidified his reputation as a crime fighter. A fictional device—Hoover is supposed to be dictating a memoir—frames the 1920s, '30s and '40s segments and gives us Hoover in decline (but still wielding power) while skipping over the 1950s entirely.

The hoary flashback structure doesn’t reveal any notable contrast in the older and younger man, aside from the almost-convincing make-up job on DiCaprio. (In that regard, I thought Naomi Watts, as Hoover’s longtime secretary, and Armie Hammer, as Tolson, were more convincingly aged.) Insofar as Hoover’s view of himself and law enforcement were concerned, he seems to have emerged fully formed in his 20s. Watching the ever-confident Hoover in action is engaging, but rarely exciting. I wonder if a musical score would have helped. Hoover most comes to life in the personal scenes. He seems only to have been close to two people, his mother (Judi Dench), who made him courageous, and Tolson. Tolson, as played by Hammer, humanizes the Hoover character, and even if you have contempt for the man’s self-aggrandizing and legally questionable tactics, the singular devotion of these men seems creditable.

Eastwood takes no clear view on whether Hoover was justified, mostly presenting Hoover as he saw himself. He takes a middle road as to the Tolson relationship. It can scarcely be doubted that these men who dined together, vacationed together, and had no other serious relationships had a romantic attachment, and Black’s screenplay assumes that. However, given how little is known about how they behaved in private, the period of Hoover’s adulthood being an age when privacy was granted to public figures, it shows wise restraint as far as sexual matters. The audience is allowed to assume what they will as regards this while it is suggested that Hoover’s upbringing, his nature, and the times would have made him disinclined to violate propriety. If there is one thing that unites Hoover’s anticommunism, his distrust of agitators like King, and his fierce approach to ordinary criminals, not to mention his careful habits of dress and speech, it seems to be a true distaste for disorder or change.

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viewed 1/11/2012 at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 1/11/2012

The Guard (***1/4)

“What a beautiful fucking day,” exclaims Brendan Gleeson at the start of this Irish comedy-drama, and few actors can muster such depth of feeling in uttering such a sentiment. The paunchy actor plays Sergeant Gerry Boyle, who finds himself temporarily partnered with an FBI agent (Don Cheadle) when some international drug smugglers, and a murder victim, wind up in his ordinarily quiet hamlet.

There are elements of a mismatched buddy comedy. When Boyle, speaking of drug smugglers who use submarines to avoid detection, says you have to admire their ingenuity, the agent says drily, “No, you don’t.” Quite a lot of the humor is dry here, as when the one of the smugglers, who’s English, corrects the others, who are Irish, on the matter of the nationality of philosopher Bertrand Russell.

The story also has the fish-out-of-water element, as one character actually points out. The FBI man’s introduction to Boyle involves racial insults, and his attempt to do some sleuthing on his own—it’s the sergeant’s day off, which even a murder investigation won’t impede—finds the locals pretending to only speak Gaelic. It’s unclear whether his race or his being an outsider has more to do with this.

The action element is also not neglected, although it’s saved for the ending. But, more than anything else, the film is a character drama and a vehicle for Gleeson. Boyle can seem like a bumpkin one moment, then show another side in the next scene. The agent tells Boyle, “I can’t tell if you’re mutherfuckin’ stupid or mutherfuckin’ smart.” In quoting this, I may falsely suggest that this is a rather broad film, but in general it’s understated and realistic. Boyle, a single man, is prone to insulting coworkers and committing certain victimless crimes from time to time, but has a soft spot for his dying mother, Croatian widows, and Disney World. It takes the length of this brief movie to reveal his true nature, and writer-director John Michael McDonagh (brother of playwright Martin McDonagh) lets the character percolate until the satisfying conclusion.

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viewed 9/8/11, 7:15 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 9/8/11

The Informant! (***1/4)

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viewed 9/27/09 at Ritz 5

Surveillance (*3/4)

This thriller by director Jennifer Lynch has just a little bit of the wierdness her dad, David Lynch, is known for, but with much less of a surreal tone and a script that goes downhill fast around the midway point. Julia Ormond and Bill Pullman are FBI agents who take over the investigation of a small-town murder spree. Some flashily edited interplay follows with the local cops, who mostly resent the agents, and with the witnesses being interviewed, who include a precocious girl and a wasted couple. But eventually things get way over the top. Typical are a couple of the cops, who spend their days shooting out the tires of passing motorists, then pulling guns on them. We are supposed to believe they can repeatedly get away with this. The mystery’s solution may or may not be predictable, but it’s not especially convincing, or subtle.

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viewed 4/4/09 at Prince Music Theater (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 5/8/09

Taxi to the Dark Side (***1/2)

Alex Gibney won the Academy Award for this documentary over, among other films, the Iraq war chronicle No End in Sight. Using the story of of an Afghani cab driver, Dilawar, as a jumping point, Gibney portrays the moral failures that have accompanied the global war on terror declared by President Bush. As with Gibney’s previous effort, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, the movie is a triumph of reportage rather than filmmaking technique. The tape of Enron employees blatantly manipulating the California energy market finds its equivalent in the autopsy footage of Dilawar’s beaten corpse, the death certificate reading “homicide,” and the famous photographs and films of blatant prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. All this is attested to by, among others, military police who were, much later, charged in the death of Dilawar.

No officers were convicted of abuse in either Afghanistan, Iraq, or Guantanemo Bay, where prisoners continue to be held, but Gibney clearly connects the abuses in all of these places to tacit and explicit policies of the administration promulgated by Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, and Department of Justice counsel John Yoo. Yoo wrote legal memoranda suggesting that no treaty, and perhaps no act of Congress, impeded the president’s ability to order torture. By removing or failing to enforce the restrictions that limited abuse, these higher-ups created the climate that encouraged a lawless climate to persist, punished the innocent, and produced no additional quantity of useful intelligence. (In fact, a coerced confession was the basis Colin Powell would use in his UN speech to suggest a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda; the link and the confession were both later discredited.)

There are many tentacles to this tale, more than I can describe. The film is divided into thematic segments, and lacks a strong narrative thread. The story of Dilawar, who died after five days in US custody, only takes up a small portion of the film. Nonetheless, Gibney utilizes a range of voices and makes a strong case that, whatever the merits of the war on terror, the battle against it has produced unnecessary victims and unintelligent “intelligence.”


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viewed and reviewed 3/4/08

The Kingdom (**3/4)

Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Chris Cooper, and Jason Bateman play a team of FBI agents who travel to Riyadh to investigate a series of bomb blasts that have killed hundreds in an American-controlled zone in the Saudi capital. The opening credits play over a series of chronological film and sound clips that telescope the history of American economic and political interests in the country, which of course are almost solely tied to the presence of oil in the region. But this montage promises more than what the movie delivers, which is an earnest but sometimes-sterile tale that celebrates the derring-do of the FBI, climaxes with a rock-’em sock-’em shootout, and ends with an ironic reminder that shootouts may solve a crime but not resolve the hatred that led to it. Director Peter Berg brings the same earnestness and sense of realism that he did to his previous effort, Friday Night Lights. However, it suffers from the same flaw, a dry approach that makes the characters fairly forgettable, even if the performances are entirely creditable. (Bateman shows the most personality.) Given the tragedy its center, I felt like I should have felt a greater emotional investment in the story.

That action-packed finish will, depending on your taste, strike you as a preposterous gloss on, or a welcome relief from, the quiet detective story of the first 90 minutes. I thought it was both. Berg and screenwriter Matthew Carnahan bring a certain veneer of authenticity to the proceedings. Garner’s character learns about a woman’s place in Saudi culture. The wise Saudi policeman in charge of aiding the FBI men, and even some of the other Saudis, are depicted with more subtlety that you might expect. But still, the basic premise, that four spunky Americans with guns and a copy of The Koran for Dummies will be able to save the day, is never in question.

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reviewed 9/30/07

War (**1/4)

Jet Li and Jason Statham have made a number of above-average action movies between them. Li has appeared in Fearless and Hero, which incorporated stunning martial-arts sequences into mythical storylines. Statham is best known for the Transporter films and Crank, no-nonsense action films that hardly slowed down and didn’t clutter their stories with sentimentality. Both are non-Americans, which may or may not be why they rarely seem as cocky as American action stars.

Here Statham plays a San Francisco FBI man who obsesses over the mysterious and little-seen assassin who three years earlier killed his partner. He spends the movie hunting down this assassin, who is called Rogue (Li). Rogue has shifted his allegiance from the Chinese Triads to their Japanese rivals and is ensured with the safe transfer of some valuable antiques that are to finance the expansion of the yakuza empire to the new world. Rogue is deadly but seems violent by trade rather than by nature. His motivations seem shrouded. There’s more to the story, but that’s the gist. The movie is quite violent—lots of shooting, lots of cutting—without there being a great deal of action. Li barely displays his martial arts skills. One decent chase sequence stands out, but the movie feels long. The twist ending, which you may or may not guess, isn’t enough to redeem a turgid movie with a higher body count than intelligence quotient. The way Rogue plays off his enemies against one another would be of more interest if those enemies were less one-dimensional.

IMDB link

reviewed 8/30/07

Shooter (**3/4)

? A US special-forces marksman (Mark Wahlberg), hired to thwart a presidential assassination, winds up a target of the would-be killers. Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) directed Jonathan Lemkin’s adaptation of the Stephen Hunter novel.
+ I was into this movie for the first half, although I figured out who the villains were. (No big deal, as that gets revealed early.) Here we see the hero display all the tricks of his trade. Like so many criminals, he figures out that Philly is a good place to kill someone and get away with it, so the pivotal scenes take place around Independence Hall, and there’s some impressive aerial footage of the city. With the help of one of the feds and a schoolteacher, he takes on platoons of unfriendly types with just some household items. The main appeal, besides huge explosions, is watching the lone wolf use his superior training to outwit and outfight everyone.
- An exciting setup, but both the premise and the outcome become implausible, then absurd, as the movie goes on. The villains are so cartoonishly evil that I was expecting one of them to shout “Bwa-ha-ha-ha!” One actually does say, “I win; you lose.” Twice. But by then the movie has descended into trite formula.
= **3/4 Worth a look for shoot-’em-up fans and conspiracy-movie buffs. Sort of similar to The Sentinel, which is a better movie.

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reviewed 3/29/07