How readily can you excuse a movie’s excessive length when its high points shoot through the ceiling? How badly do you need a character to achieve redemption, or even a shred of likability? Your answers will determine how you feel about The Wolf of Wall Street, the raucous new Martin Scorsese-Leonardo DiCaprio collaboration that makes Oliver Stone’s Wall Street look like a Nativity play.
My answers? When a movie is this wildly entertaining, and assembled with such unabashed love for the film medium, I’m all in. Wolf is based on the memoir of Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio), a womanizing, pill-popping, penny-stock swindler who builds an empire of bacchanalia out of a storefront brokerage house. He is not a role model.
Scorsese, working with a script by Boardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter, turns his antihero into the ultimate unreliable narrator, guiding us through a series of episodes that take great pleasure in bad behavior. Don’t do as he says, or as he does. But good luck taking your eyes off him.
Jordan starts his career at a legitimate firm, where his boss (an all-too-fleeting performance by Matthew McConaughey) advises him to masturbate as often as possible and do lots of coke. Then Black Monday hits, the market craters and our antihero starts Stratton Oakmont, a Long Island chop shop of illegal trading. Illegal how? On two occasions DiCaprio faces the camera and starts to tell us, only to stop midstream to acknowledge the details are a little boring. The perks, however, are not.
Wolf’s feckless felons, wannabe masters of the universe, are hooked on The Life, much as the GoodFellas gang was addicted to the rush of small-time crime. The filmmakers, in turn, are hooked on the rush of sound and image. They depict the trading floor at Stratton Oakmont as a frat party past the point of no return, a haven of hookers, cocaine and lots of Quaaludes, the effects of which are turned into some of the most baroque drug comedy ever captured on film.
Dubious distinction? Maybe. Fun to watch? Indisputably.
Jordan’s voiceover talks to itself, to the audience, to other characters; it lands in the cracks between lines of dialogue and gives a master class in unreliable narration. The music cues cut scenes into pieces and link one image to the next with devious precision. The Wolf of Wall Street achieves something close to stream of consciousness, a free-flowing, undiluted distillation of experience fueled by sound and image.
The story runs out of gas with about 30 minutes left; The Wolf of Wall Street runs about three hours, and you can feel a few scenes wheezing on too long for their own good. The movie’s immense pleasures are episodic, but the images become etched in the brain. That will happen with Rodrigo Prieto manning the cameras and longtime Scorsese film editor Thelma Schoonmaker slicing and dicing the pictures. The movie operates on adrenaline.
It also happens to be very funny. Yes, this is a comedy of bad manners, not a tragedy (like Scorsese’s Casino) or an economic or social treatise. That would entail a degree of shame, a quality from which The Wolf of Wall Street is gleefully liberated. Watch your wallet and enjoy the ride.
Follow Chris Vognar on Twitter at @chrisvognar.
THE WOLF
OF WALL STREET
A- Directed by Martin Scorsese. R (sequences of strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language throughout, and for some violence). 180 mins. In wide release.
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