There is a lot of really good stuff in it, but it is way too long (one-hundred and seventy-nine minutes), and it contains some insanely gratuitous nudity, and for stretches veers towards Mommie Dearest camp-lite.
It is, like American Hustle as well, what I call a Pop Film. It is a collection of Set Pieces without a really solid coherent satisfying believable through-line.
Sometimes the scenes, the set pieces, can be so good that you do not really care, and you begin to appreciate the film more as a Revue Film. Five Easy Pieces is like that for me. And, oftentimes these Pop Films are righteously over the top and deliriously camp. They tend to have lots of sex in them, too. Or, at least a sexy sensibility.
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| "Leo, I got us some Lemmon ludes!" |
Whatever. The fact is that there are about ninety minutes that could be cut from this film. If it had been perhaps even more helter skelter, and bewildering, and incomprehensible, but still contained all the great scenes that I loved (everything with Matthew McConaughey -- the film desperately cries out for more McConaughey -- and the sales meetings; the breaking the fourth wall stuff; the great scene on the boat with the FBI agent) then I dare say The Wolf of Wall Street might have become a personal cult fave.
Still, there is enough camp-lite and big time stars doing insanely dopey things that the film probably will become a decent sized home video cult classic for certain types of folks, and Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio devotees.
Just not me.
The Wife liked it more than I did.
Ardent
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