First Impressions

Last night I finally got around to watching this...


...and it was awesome.  Fast, funny, fearless, and staggering performances from not only Dicaprio as Jordan Belfort (seriously, Academy, you must've been sampling some of the substances on display to have chosen McConaughey over him), but from the entire cast.  Jona Hill, in particular, was a revelation!

I immediately gave it 5 stars on Netflix.

This morning, however, I found myself questioning if it really was that good.

The performances I still cannot fault - there wasn't a single weak link, with almost the entirety of the main cast being asked to play comedy, tragedy, quiet drama and balls-to-the-wall outlandishness at the drop of a hat - but the more I thought about it, the more holes I found elsewhere.

For a start, it's predictable.  As outlandish as the characters behave from scene to scene, the plot is so by-the-numbers you can chart it from the most generic of generic synopses: It's a decadent rags-to-riches, rise-and-fall story.  Scarface, Wall Street, Goodfellas; if you've seen any of them (or a hundred others) you know exactly how it goes.

Then there's the timeline: We're given musical cues throughout to represent the period, but the timing often suggests we've been in this particular year for some unknown time.

There's also little character closure beyond Belfort.  Yes, it's his story (and a 'true' one, so any extraneous info is, presumably, out there somewhere), but I was still left questioning what happened to the supporting characters: How did they deal with the crash of '87?  What happened to her?  What happened to him? Who was charged, what with and what punishment was dished out?

Even an Animal House-style blurb ahead of the closing credits would've been welcomed: "Rugrat was indicted on 600 charges of market manipulation, 300 charges of substance abuse and 1 charge of fraudulent hair.  He served 4 years as a McDonald's scrubber, before being promoted to fries and dying of a salt overdose."

But here's the thing: Should I judge the film on my immediate reaction, or mark it down because of the problems I've thought of after the fact?  Is my initial enjoyment more important than analytical hindsight?

Looking at it from the other side, when I first saw The Dark Knight Rises, I was underwhelmed.  No, it was never going to live up to The Dark Knight, but it was more than that: the film felt bloated and ponderous, the plot was silly, the tone was a mess and the ending as crap.

However, I did enjoy it a lot more the second time around.  Already being aware of the issues, I was able to ignore them and enjoy the spectacle: the airborne heist; the bat-pod chase; Hathaway's Catwoman; the climactic battle; Hathaway's Catwoman...

Did any of that make it a better film?  I'm inclined to say no, because all of that was there before, but was undermined by its issues.

So does noticing Wolf of Wall Street's issues after the fact make it a worse film?  That, I find more difficult to answer.  On the one hand, those issues were already there, but I didn't notice because of how much I was enjoying the rest.  If anything, this elevates the quality of what did work.  On the other hand, when those issues do come to mind, it means that enjoyment can be lessened over time, reducing its lasting appeal.

Maybe it's more of a scale thing.  I thoroughly enjoyed Die Another Day when I first saw it; now I see it as a depressing piece of shit.  I didn't get The Life Aquatic when I first saw it; now I adore it!

You see, none of this is to say I now consider Wolf of Wall Street to be a bad film - issues or not, it's a tremendous and highly entertaining piece of work - it's just that it did get me thinking about how I judge films.