Every year after the Oscars, the nominated films seem to fall into two categories--those that won, and those that history will remember more favorably than the winners. Granted, some of the winners manage to fall into the second category as well, but more often they don’t. This year, the coveted Best Picture Oscar went to a film worthy of its prestige: Steve McQueen’s relentless historical drama 12 Years A Slave, while two other nominees--Alfonso Cuarón’s poignant cinematic space spectacle Gravity and Martin Scorsese’s equally poignant epic black comedy The Wolf of Wall Street--take their rightful place as not only the most important films of 2013, but two of Cinema’s most significant landmarks.
The 12 Years a Slave Win at the end of this year’s Oscars cast a long shadow over the roaring sweep of preceding Oscar wins for Gravity, including Best Visual Effects, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing, as well as Best Cinematography and Best Director for Cuarón. This particular series of wins demonstrates Gravity’s enormous impact on special effects and filmmaking in general. In terms of mere technical achievement, Gravity is the next Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (that’s the 1895 Lumiere Brothers short that had audiences diving out of their seats in fear of the train in the film coming rapidly toward them): audiences have never seen anything like it before, nor do they live in the same cinematic world that existed before they did (the film even made whatever technical innovations Avatar boasted obsolete--quite the accomplishment). To put it simply, Gravity is an unprecedented game changer.
2013 would have gone down in history as one of the most important years in modern film with the release of Gravity alone, but it also gave us The Wolf of Wall Street, which left audiences in cinematic whiplash from its unbridled epic narrative of white male debauchery every bit as much as Gravity’s terrifying spacescape. Unlike Gravity, however, Wolf came out of the Oscars winning zero of its five nominations (the most controversial of which being Leonardo DiCaprio’s Best Actor loss to Matthew McConaughey). Granted, Scorsese lost the Best Director Oscar to Cuarón, so no complaints there. But what Wolf’s nominations and losses demonstrate, as opposed to Gravity, is that the film’s innovations are far less quantifiable in Oscar terms. If Gravity represents unprecedented innovation on a technical level, The Wolf of Wall Street is innovation on the narrative and cultural fronts.
In the A.V. Club’s review of Wolf, A.A. Dowd noted that early 2013 releases like Spring Breakers, Pain and Gain, and The Bling Ring were mere appetizers to the full meal of Martin Scorsese’s “aggressively broad satire of American ambition”. In former stockswindler Jordan Belfort’s shockingly true tale of ultimate excess at the heart of America’s most ferocious financial den-of-thieves, Scorsese found a tale he could cinematically execute with as much chaos as the story itself. As the film industry has rapidly become more a vehicle for franchise marketing and spectacle, Television has become the place where audiences go for interesting characters and complex storytelling (i.e. Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Girls, Game of Thrones, etc.). The Wolf of Wall Street has reclaimed that space for film in a variety of ways.
First of all, it's nothing short of incredible that audiences and critics alike have responded so favorably to a ferociously dark comedy with a three-hour running time. What’s even more incredible is that the film doesn’t feel that long at all. Nor does it drag, not for one minute. Only Scorsese could have succeeded in a task this daunting, especially considering Wolf’s insatiable no-holds-barred content. Leonardo DiCaprio has stated that in early production talks for the film, the question was seriously considered as to how long an audience could stand following characters so unapologetically despicable. The miraculous thing is that Scorsese manages to keep us both enthralled and enlightened throughout the entire drug-and-sex fueled ride.
This may be partly due to the fact that Scorsese is a veteran raconteur of ingenious “bad boy” tales. Films like Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Taxi Driver, The King of Comedy, and The Last Temptation of Christ all cover similar themes of human darkness from uncensored perspectives, but Wolf stands out among these films as the one with the content and form to match the mayhem. The film is indeed a true test of endurance for American audiences--unabashedly showcasing every act of debauchery and frivolous indulgence that Jordan Belfort and his gang of greedy bastards could possibly engage in on their eternal quest for power (the now-infamous plane orgy scene is particularly nauseating)--and the fact that Scorsese and DiCaprio were able to make this 21st century Bosch painting of a movie is due largely to independent funding (a trend we'll hopefully be seeing more of in the future of mainstream filmmaking). The result is something quite revolutionary in a film industry whose financial climate has muffled truly honest voices, and the critical and commercial success of a film so incredibly relentless and wholly singular as The Wolf of Wall Street shows us--and, more importantly, shows those Hollywood executives--that great things can happen when the real artists are left to their craft.
Despite Wolf’s earned place among the frontrunners of Scorsese’s most celebrated films (as things stand, it just might be his magnum opus of magnum opuses), I would argue that Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut is a more fitting spiritual predecessor. The film was also a dark, chaotic, and highly visceral tale told by an American master of cinema, and was also highly controversial for its relentlessly graphic sexual content. But where Eyes Wide Shut failed in gaining wide exposure and broad cultural impact upon its release, Wolf has somehow shattered similar barriers and paved the way for a future of more honest and daring films with higher box-office potential. If Gravity is the train coming directly at the audience, then Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is the train that breaks through the screen and obliterates everything in its path.
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