Film Review: “The Wolf of Wall Street”

Initially, the heavily hyped Martin Scorsese film, “The Wolf
of Wall Street,” seems an unusual effort for the director of so many dark,
urban crime stories rich in violence and ethnicity. The rollercoaster ride of
his latest movie offers a different set of subjects, situations, and characters
— no cops, no mobsters, no shootings, stabbings, and beatings, no sense of a
troubled Catholicism. In short, there’s no hint of the director’s famous mean
streets and all they comprehend.

At the same time, despite the apparent departures from many
of his previous works, the picture demonstrates a number of familiar Scorsese
touches. To begin with, the movie deals with a gang of criminals, albeit of the
white-collar variety, an unscrupulous group of stock manipulators and
swindlers, the kind of people who regularly populate the
daily headlines. Based on the memoir of Jordan Belfort, the actual leader of
that actual gang of crooks, in many ways it resembles another fact-based
Scorsese film, the gangster flick “GoodFellas.”

In a voice-over narration — another Scorsese favorite — Jordan
Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), sounding a good deal
like Ray Liotta and often addressing the audience
directly, begins with an account of his enormous monetary success, listing his
grand houses, his six cars, his yacht, and his stunning trophy wife (Margot
Robbie), then flashes back to his early days as a fledgling stockbroker with a
legitimate Wall Street firm. Almost as soon as it begins, his career ends with
the 1987 stock market collapse, but Belfort finds work in a sleazy Long Island
boiler room operation, selling penny stocks to naïve investors, and fleecing
them for all they’re worth. His success at the boiler room leads him to found
his own firm of swindlers with his faithful sidekick Donnie Azoff
(Jonah Hill), launching him and his cohorts into the financial stratosphere.

Most of the movie concentrates on Belfort’s meteoric rise and
the ways he and his firm of greedy wastrels spend
their astonishing wealth. The stockbrokers consume mountains of cocaine, a
whole pharmacopeia of uppers, downers, and in-betweeners,
various morphine derivatives, and the great favorite of the era, Quaaludes.
Belfort lists all the substances he ingests, then
ranks the genres of prostitutes he and his colleagues hire, according to
appearance, talents, and likelihood of infection.

Throughout the film he combines the sex with the drugs,
frequently snorting cocaine off the naked bodies of gorgeous women. When he
journeys to Switzerland to hide $20 million in cash, he creates a sort of
portable orgy, attempting drug-crazed sexual assaults on the female flight
attendants. A kind of comic decadence pervades most of his interactions with
his employees, who dance and sing and chant along with their leader, glorying
in the millions they make by pumping up stock prices and overselling worthless
paper; he pays a secretary $10,000 to have her head shaved in front of the
whole firm and in one precious moment, he and his partners discuss the rules of
dwarf-tossing, a betting game they play in the film.

The movie runs three hours, lengthened by far too many
repeated scenes of Belfort exhorting his people to make even more millions,
showing off his $40,000 watch, his $5,000 suit, tearing up $100 bills for
confetti, and simply glorying in an entirely disgusting display of joyful
greed. Matching the excessiveness of the subject, the actors, including DiCaprio, play their parts with considerable exaggeration;
in one relatively brief sequence, Matthew McConaughey
turns in a wonderfully quirky performance, advising Belfort that the keys to
success are cocaine and masturbation.

Distressingly, especially for a Scorsese picture, “The Wolf
of Wall Street” establishes no moral center, barely hinting at the smug,
audacious criminality of Belfort’s work — he served time in prison — and never
mentioning the lives he ruined. Nor does the script even hint at the continuing
illegality of what a Republican presidential aspirant called vulture
capitalism. Worst of all, it seems highly likely that the glamorous
presentation of stock fraud and its benefits for its practitioners — the
expensive luxuries, the untrammeled decadence, the wallowing in sex and drugs, the
jubilant celebrations of sheer greed — will inspire a whole new generations to
seek an MBA and a job on Wall Street.

This article appears in Dec 25-31, 2013.