Third place:
Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave [97 points / 15 votes]
Second place:
Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity [101 points / 16 votes]
And your winner...
Martin Scorsese, The Wolf of Wall Street [126 points / 20 votes]
Should you find anyone who still wants to publish hand wringing click-bait articles about the faux controversy around The Wolf of Wall Street this late in the game, the first thing this should tell you is said person is profoundly cinematically illiterate.
It is true that Scorsese stops short of having a character come out a la the psychiatrist in Psycho to shake his jowls at the camera and tut, "These people are bad, very very bad," which is apparently all the film's detractors would accept. But set aside the various ways that Scorsese condemns the characters, up to and including casting himself as Jordan Belfort's first victim (OK, I couldn't resist the one) and you will still know Scorsese's exact opinion of Belfort and his crew through intertexuality alone. Borrowing shots from Dryer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, Scorsese puts Belfort and his crew of morlocks on the same moral level as those who burn innocent young girls at the stake. Then, just in case you missed the point, he has them enthusiastically do the chant from Freaks. Not only are the brokers in Wall Street subhuman, they are gleefully subhuman - an argument advanced in the form of cinematic references.
And after the cinematic high of The Wolf of Wall Street wore off, I realized what I was going to miss on that inevitable day that Scorsese leaves us (ideally in fifty years or so). Many praised Wolf's energy and its ingenuity. While it is remarkable that a seventy-one-year-old director could create something this kinetic, and it's impossible to deny the usual tactile pleasures of a Scorsese film (including another pitch-perfect soundtrack - "Can I say yeahyeahyeahyeahyeah"), energetic directors are easy to come by. Directors who truly have the entire length and breadth of cinema in the back of their heads? Who can call it up at will to shade a scene just so? There are only a few of those around. And Scorsese is still their king.
Of course Scorsese has hardly been shy about highlighting outside cinematic influence in his films. It was text in Hugo. He spoke openly of the influence of the Korean New Wave on Shutter Island (blended with a distinctly Lewtonesque feel). There were the numerous callbacks to Scarface and The Public Enemy in The Departed, the Technicolor tinting in The Aviator, etc. etc and so on and so forth all the way to JR talking John Ford with Girl in Who's That Knocking On My Door?, forever and ever amen. Yet Wolf of Wall Street finds Scorsese drawing on a branch of cinematic history distinct from his usual touchstones. Despite its American subject matter, The Wolf of Wall Street feels like Scorsese's most European film.
There is unquestionably American influences in the film (e.g. the aforementioned Tod Browning callback), and many have already pointed to the Martin-and-Lewis-style chemistry between DiCaprio and Hill. The Quaaludes scene would undoubtedly have done Frank Tashlin proud. Scorsese even makes some knowing tweaks of his own work. Belfort begins the trademark fourth-wall-breaking explanatory monologues that Henry Hill, Ace Rothstein and Amsterdam Vallon delivered before him but usually breaks off midstream in contempt, assuring us that we are too dumb to understand what he's up to anyway, so why not just roll with it. The three aforementioned characters commit dark deeds, but their explanations invite us to be complicit. It's an intimacy that Scorsese explicitly rejects with Belfort.
But Wolf feels in a strange way akin to Dr. Strangelove, a film that is comedic because it is too deeply furious to be anything else. It's a film that looks at the unfettered demolition derby that people like Belfort have turned our economy (and by extension our society) into with deep loathing and it can't help but turn them into fools. Drama, even scathing drama would give them too much dignity. And who were better chroniclers of human venality than the European filmmakers of Scorsese's youth?
Scorsese has always primarily drawn on American films in his work. Even when he did venture across the Atlantic, his most notable influence was Michael Powell. But when a nearly nude marching band bursts into the office of Belfort and his cohorts, blasting brass while money rains and midgets are tossed, there is something distinctly Felliniesque about it. When Belfort lays belly down on the floor with a face full of shoe leather and his eyes on his wife's vagina, mewing piteously, Buñuel comes to mind. Though occasionally drawn to it (Shutter Island, Bringing Out the Dead, the boxing sequences in Raging Bull), Scorsese is better known for his gritty realis, than any indulgence of surrealism in his work. But just as he has to render his characters comic, he has to paint their decadence as surreal.
Wolf stands then not just as a comedy, not just as a moral film, but ultimately as an example of a master who understands cinema in its totality and has the skill to bring that knowledge to bear on any subject he chooses in any fashion he chooses. In the grand sweep of Scorsese's career, The Wolf of Wall Street could very well be considered a minor film. And in a sense it is. But oh man, just as an example of what he can do... Bellissima." -- Bryce Wilson
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