DiCaprio plays another rich criminal in ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’

Paramount has begun building hype for Leonardo DiCaprio’s
latest project, The Wolf of Wall Street,
directed by Martin Scorsese. The first trailer for the film, slated to hit
theaters November 15, released on Sunday. The
Wolf of Wall Street is based on Jordan Belfort’s 2007 memoir of the same
name. Belfort, a hedge fund manager, made hundreds of millions of dollars in
the 1980s and ’90s through his brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont, until it was
discovered that the firm was inflating stocks and committing fraud, as well as
perpetrating other financial crimes. Belfort was arrested and spent nearly two
years in prison.

The Wolf of Wall
Street trailer bears several striking similarities to DiCaprio’s most
recent movie, The Great Gatsby, both
thematically and in terms of promotional materials. It’s clear that, like Gatsby, Scorsese will devote much of Wolf’s screen time to the protagonist’s
startling displays of wealth. Girls, drugs, wads of cash, luxurious
settings—all are featured prominently in the two-minute-fifteen-second Wolf trailer. The promos for both films
are also carried by a DiCaprio voiceover, explaining his character’s meteoric
rise in wealth and reputation.

Most obviously, both trailers are ushered along by a Kanye
West song—or, in Gatsby’s case, a
West-Jay-Z collaboration. “No Church in the Wild” (Gatsby) and “Black
Skinhead” (Wolf) both feature wild
yells, pounding drum beats, and West’s emotive, angry rapping. The songs provide
a thrilling adrenaline rush, and breathlessly shuttle viewers from shots of
over-the-top parties and all the trappings of excessive wealth, to hints of
DiCaprio’s characters’ downfall and emotional collapse. In fact, Wolf could easily be seen as the latest
in a trilogy of DiCaprio films which explore the indulgence and devastation
created when men from humble beginnings turn to crime and gain incredible
wealth, starting with 2002’s Catch Me if
You Can and continuing with Gatsby.

Wolf looks like a
skillful and highly entertaining drama, far closer in quality to the excellent Catch Me if You Can than this year’s
disappointing Gatsby. Jonah Hill and Matthew
McConaughey (who has shown himself to be terrific in smaller comedic parts,
from Dazed and Confused through Magic Mike) also promise to deliver memorable
performances in supporting roles.

Wolf screenwriter Terence
Winter already has plenty of practice creating devious, charismatic crooks, as
a writer and executive producer on “Boardwalk Empire,” which like Gatsby, is set in the 1920s. Scorsese, of course,
built his career on depicting such characters in award-winning films like Goodfellas, The Departed, and Gangs of New York. It will be quite interesting to
see what parallels the pair draws between the white-collar criminals of the
Roaring Twenties and those of the 1990s.