So among such classic figures as Travis Bickle, Rupert Pupkin, Jake LaMotta and Henry Hill, we can now add Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort, a figure who’s as maniacally driven, selfish and downright compelling as any Scorsese character you’d care to mention. The result is a veritable torrent of cash, as Belfort and his growing team of oddball brokers begin fleecing the wealthy with shares that have little chance of accruing any meaningful value. But as the riches begin to pile up at Belfort’s feet – houses, helicopters, sports cars, yachts – the FBI begins to take an interest in the firm’s activities. From The Wolf Of Wall Street’s opening scene, Scorsese openly references his own movies. There’s the narration, freeze-frame and juke box soundtrack of Goodfellas, and the soapy, lavish, multi-character sprawl of Casino. The intention is clear: this is another Scorsese crime drama, though the criminals here are of the white-collar, platinum credit card-flashing variety. DiCaprio’s magnificent as Belfort, who’s seemingly impelled to consume everything around him with an insatiable appetite, whether it happens to be the affection of women (among them Margot Robbie’s glacially elegant Naomi), rare vintage drugs or unfeasibly large Long Island mansions. Everything is a slave to his vanity, and there is nothing that can’t be purchased – to put it in his own oddly poetic words, “Money doesn’t just buy you power – it also makes you a better person.” Jonah Hill is a true wild card as Belfort’s cousin-marrying, crack-smoking, bulging-eyed right-hand man, putting in a demented performance that is entirely keeping with the heightened tone Scorsese’s going for – in place of the cold-blooded violence of Goodfellas, there’s blackly comic sleaze and rampant excess. The Wolf Of Wall Street’s black comedy is all the more cutting because of its punchline: Belfort may be a crook, but his methods and goals were little different from the bankers and brokers who brought the financial system to its knees in the 2007-08 financial crisis. Seemingly energised by this, Scorsese serves up an angry, urgent movie which sets out to provoke from the first frame to the last; his camera lingers over every detail, refusing to pass judgement on all the selfishness and consumption, but merely asking: are we sickened by Belfort’s lifestyle, or exhilarated by it? It’s too early to say whether The Wolf Of Wall Street will be described in the same breath as Scorsese’s very best movies – Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas – but it’s undoubtedly akin to those pieces of work. Like them, The Wolf Of Wall Street is a crime drama and a razor-sharp character study, this time shot through with a wide streak of bitter, mordant humour. It sees DiCaprio digging deep to bring out one of his career-best performances, and Scorsese exploring every inch of his sordid subject matter to deliver his best movie in well over a decade. The Wolf Of Wall Street is out in UK cinemas on the 17th January 2014. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
title: “The Wolf Of Wall Street Review” ShowToc: true date: “2025-08-14” author: “Anita Murphy”
It’s just too bad that Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire), working from the real-life Belfort’s memoir, didn’t take that analogy further. The Wolf of Wall Street is, purely in cinematic terms, Marty in near top form: breathless pacing, on-the-mark editing (by Thelma Schoonmaker, of course), a selection of truly dazzling shots and a couple of unforgettable set pieces. But while he may enjoy spending three hours with Belfort – an arrogant a-hole of epic proportions who never really deviates from that description – the effect on the viewer is ultimately numbing. After that opening sequence, the film flashes back to a younger, more naïve Belfort, fresh off the subway from Bayside, Queens and looking to make his way onto Wall Street. His one defining characteristic is that he wants to make money, and he is quickly taken under the wing of half-mad, half-dissolute broker Mark Hanna (a loopy Matthew McConaughey). When Hanna’s firm goes bust after the crash of 1987, however, Belfort must start from scratch, joining a storefront penny-stock trading company on Long Island where he quickly makes a name for himself as someone who is so good he can sell shit to a sewer worker. Belfort soon meets already drug-crazed Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill), a furniture salesman equally obsessed with making dough, and the two set up their own firm. The first half of the movie charts their seemingly unstoppable upward trajectory, as Belfort enlists a bunch of his old neighborhood friends (who mostly just scowl or scream and include Walking Dead alumnus Jon Bernthal) as his initial staff and, before you know it, turns the company into a Wall Street powerhouse, raking in tens of millions of dollars and attracting the interest of a straight-laced FBI agent (Kyle Chandler) who correctly suspects that Stratton Oakmont doesn’t exactly play fair. As with David O. Russell’s American Hustle – which this also bears comparison to – the intricacies of Stratton Oakmont’s many scams are more or less left vague, with Belfort even turning to the camera at least twice to tell us that we don’t care about the details anyway (thanks Jordan!). Instead, everything revolves around drugs, antisocial behavior, sex, fighting, screaming and depravity, over and over and over again. Most of it is played for laughs and none of it ultimately resonates as more than Scorsese pushing his R rating as far as he can take it. The one scene that goes darker – in which Belfort beats Naomi and endangers their young daughter – is so different in tone that it feels like the director dropped it in from another version of the story. Individual scenes are terrific: Belfort’s first meeting with Chandler’s agent on the former’s yacht is a symphony of awkward pauses and innuendo as Belfort makes a half-hearted attempt at bribery, while a climactic Quaalude sequence – involving the steps of a country club, a phone cord and a slice of ham, among other things – is a mini-masterpiece of drug-fueled idiocy. As for the performances, DiCaprio and Hill scream and thrash their way through the movie, both of them swinging for the fences and largely over them. DiCaprio does bring forth a sort of seething arrogance that makes this perhaps his darkest performance in many ways, while Hill finds new and entertaining ways to make his eyes bulge. Robbie’s thick Brooklyn accent cannot hide her flat line delivery and, physical assets aside, she is a far less interesting female character than either Lorraine Bracco’s Karen from Goodfellas or Sharon Stone’s Ginger in Casino. During the scene with the Feds on his yacht, which is docked at the back of the World Financial Center in downtown Manhattan, the camera shows that Belfort keeps his private helicopter on the roof of the boat for that extra bit of obnoxious extravagance. I realized with some surprise that I used to see that yacht all the time when I lived near the World Financial Center many years ago. I often wondered who owned a yacht on which they had the extreme self-regard to also park a helicopter. Now I know, and I can safely say that even three hours in his company is too long. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for all news updates related to the world of geek. And Google+, if that’s your thing!
