In “The Wolf of Wall Street,” he leaves impersonation behind and unleashes spontaneous bursts of energy that seem to tear through the screen. (DiCaprio is thirty-nine, but I intend no insult here-Humphrey Bogart didn’t come fully into his own until after forty.) DiCaprio has always been an extraordinarily gifted mimic, but his performances have been burdened with a second layer of mimicry-he has to play a star as well as his role. Leonardo DiCaprio, playing Belfort, gives the first fully satisfying, elbows-out, uninhibited screen performance that I’ve seen from him.
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The movie has a sharply rhythmic swing, like a great jazz band in flat-out rumble, thanks to Scorsese’s stylistic inventiveness and the wild, exhilarating performances that he elicits from his cast. “The Wolf of Wall Street” may be Scorsese’s most fully realized movie, with its elaboration of a world view that, without endorsing Belfort’s predatory manipulations and reckless adventures, acknowledges the essential vitality at their core. Its furious cinematic inventions are no mere flourishes they’re essential to Scorsese’s vision of Belfort’s story, and to the disturbing moral ideas that he extracts from it.
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He also introduces a great device to impose the protagonist’s point of view: Belfort narrates the action even while he’s in the midst of living it, addressing the camera with monologues that show him to be both inside and outside the events, converging on-screen his present and former selves. Scorsese unleashes a furious, yet exquisitely controlled, kinetic energy, complete with a plunging and soaring camera, mercurial and conspicuous special effects, counterfactual scenes, subjective fantasies, and swirling choreography on a grand scale. The jangled story line sticks close to Belfort’s perspective his voice guides the action, and Scorsese’s freewheeling direction captures the autobiographer’s raunchy, discursive vigor.