Ethan Hawke, infamous for his horror oeuvre accumulated over the past decade and a half, is so renowned for his performances in films like Sinister and The Black Phone that it is almost impossible to understand how a man imbued with the minds of the twisted, depraved, and haunted might be horrified with the realities of mankind.
The insanity of people on the verge of gaining everything until they gamble and lose it all must be even more terrifying than the almost simplistic horror portrayed by the supernatural. The ideologies that are portrayed by the destructive minds of men are more unthinkable than the mind-numbingly boring and screaming banality of horror.
Ethan Hawke Was Traumatized For a Year By Leo DiCaprio
Martin Scorsese has created many a masterpiece in his life as a filmmaker and an auteur in the field of cinema. From Robert De Niro’s Taxi Driver to Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Wolf of Wall Street, Scorsese has mastered the art of depicting human depravity at its pinnacle through the lens of a movie reel. But while Taxi Driver delivers a gut punch of sluggish gore and horror fest, Wolf takes the audience on a whirlwind romance of greed, power, and destruction.
While it has been impossible to look away from any of Scorsese’s crafted sculptures of audio and visionary delights on screen, DiCaprio’s portrayal of Jordan Belfort and his reign over Wall Street perhaps takes the cake in its almost ‘American Psycho’-esque show of apathy and spiraling destruction. In fact, the vision so affected the cinephile, Ethan Hawke, that he claimed: “That movie’s haunted me for a year.”
Critique of Leonardo DiCaprio’s The Wolf of Wall Street
Sleep isn’t the only thing that Ethan Hawke lost since watching the film that broke out Margot Robbie into mainstream Hollywood. The actor, although appreciating the artistic brilliance of the film and its socio-cultural significance in the modern history of cinema failed to grasp the fact that Wolf in itself serves as a critique of human greed and destruction by presenting those traits in its purest, most unadulterated form. In an interview with Daily Beast in 2014, Ethan Hawke railed against Scorsese’s narrative:
“The Wolf of Wall Street is a dangerous, incendiary work of art. You leave the theater thinking, ‘Wait a second… I was just force-fed misogyny and awful behavior for three hours, but I’m very unsure of things.’”
Hardly any man since the auspicious coming of character actor, Robert De Niro has anybody been able to hold Martin Scorsese’s attention for so long as Leo DiCaprio has. Having worked on multiple films together, their ideologies meld into the same threads of understanding. So when criticism poured in about the Oscar-nominated 2013 film being detrimental to society by enabling, allowing, and promoting such ideologies as were shown in the film, he claimed:
“It is an indictment of this world. We don’t like these people. But we very consciously said, ‘Let’s insulate the audience in the mindset of what these people’s lives were like so we better understand something about the very culture that we live in.’
So to be able to do a film like that, with a director like Marty, knowing that he didn’t want to pass judgment on these people because he doesn’t like this world. He doesn’t like these people, but he’s fascinated by this world. He’s fascinated about what it is in human nature that makes us this destructive to others and ourselves.”
The Wolf of Wall Street currently holds an 80% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and lost the Oscar to 12 Years a Slave starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Lupita Nyong’o. Scorsese and DiCaprio have in the meanwhile released their latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon in 2023. Ethan Hawke, on the other hand, has tried his hand at engaging the Marvel crowd with his Phase Four series starring Oscar Isaac, Moon Knight.
Source: Daily Beast
