For the next few weeks we’ll all be talking about Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, because it’s a big movie, and an awards contender, and, as our own film editor says, pretty damn good. I have not seen the film yet, but per Deadline Hollywood yesterday, it displays the usual Scorsese love of the expletive and even a little more sex than we’ve come to expect from him:
The film begins with an assault of coarse language — c*cksucker, f*cking, and lines like “who’s ever sucked a dog’s c*ck out of loneliness,” and “f*ck this, sh*t that, c*ck, c*nt, a**hole” — and within the first hour and 15 minutes, audiences will see two orgies; heavy drug use (smoking crack, snorting loads of cocaine); a father and son offhandedly discussing (at length) what’s au courant in women’s “bushes”; a woman performing oral sex on one man while getting rammed from behind from another; full frontal nudity of women; and lots of misogyny. There is also a scene later of a prostitute pulling a candle out of the rectum of a married Jordan Belfort (played by DiCaprio) who then drops hot wax up and down his back.
And yet, it received an R rating, to everyone’s surprise. That light rating came about in part, Deadline Hollywood reports, to the presence of a “consigliere” named Tom Sherak who ran interference between Scorsese and the MPAA.