Oscars 2014: If We Picked The Winners (Best Adapted Screenplay)

3. Terrence Winter - The Wolf Of Wall Street

Perhaps more than any other film this year, The Wolf of Wall Street has been a force to be reckoned with. Recently crossing the $300 million mark globally, making The Wolf of Wall Street Martin Scorsese's highest grossing movie ever, it's clear that despite all the moral handwringing and controversy over whether the film celebrates, condones, or condemns the extreme behavior of its criminal characters, the public sure endorses the film. Based on the memoir of Jordan Belfort, a sleazy stockbroker who scammed who knows how many people out of countless amounts of money, pocketing millions for himself along the way, the film is an excessive film about excess. Written by Terrence Winter, a former writer for HBO's The Sopranos and the creator and showrunner of the network's current hit show, Boardwalk Empire, the film ran into a bit of trouble for what some saw as a 3-hour glamorization of greedy, hedonistic Wall Street pigs without any clear moral clarification on the crimes committed in the film or sympathy for the plight of Belfort's victims. While I clearly side with Scorsese and Co. in terms of portraying his characters as they are, without didactic moral messaging, the film does present an interesting quandary when it comes to filmmaking, and screenwriting in particular. The Wolf of Wall Street essentially amounts to a string of repetitive (yet usually highly entertaining) scenes of eccentric and narcissistic characters indulging themselves in their most primal desires, which apparently are to take drugs and have sex, with the occasional midget tossing thrown in for good measure. Supposedly highly improvised (which probably means slightly rewritten on the day of the shoot, not literally improvised as the camera rolled) , however much of it was thought up directly by Winter and however much was created by Scorsese and his actors, doesn't really matter. Within the scenes themselves, and over short spans of the movie, both the actual dialogue and the set pieces are adroitly written, creating some of the most memorable moments of the year in cinema. Anyone who has spent time watching Winter's television shows can tell you that the man can write a good scene and has an appropriate taste for the dramatic without going overboard, which he illustrates yet again in his script for The Wolf of Wall Street. Where The Wolf of Wall Street does stumble a bit is in its narrative structure. While the film engages you throughout and is rather quick for its 180 minute runtime, at the end it never quite adds up to the sum of its pieces. Winter gives the film the old "rise and fall" trope in order to make the movie feel like it's actually moving somewhere, but while this worked well in Scorsese's previous films such as Goodfellas and Casino, without the threat of impending death that existed in those films, the stakes just don't feel all that high in The Wolf of Wall Street and the narrative decision feels more lazy than anything else. Of course though, the whole point of The Wolf of Wall Street seems to be that people such as Jordan Belfort run off of the excess of immediate gratification, so the fact the film's narrative is a joy ride to nowhere in particular becomes part of the subtext itself, and this is where the quandary come in. How do you make a movie about the banality of excess, mirroring the spirit of the characters and story, without become excessive yourself? I'm not sure if there is a solution to that riddle, but if they didn't exactly solve it, you must give Winter and Scorsese credit for making it one hell of an entertaining ride.