Review: The Wolf of Wall Street

The hedonistic life and times of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), from his beginnings as an ambitious wannabe Wall Street player to his enjoyment of a wealthy lifestyle of sex, drugs, and financial crime…and then the inevitable hard crash as his criminal ways catch up with him. Jonah Hill plays Belfort’s shiny-teeth sporting cohort Donnie, Matthew McConaughey plays Belfort’s soulless mentor, Cristin Milioti and Margot Robbie play Belfort’s first and second wives, Jean Dujardin plays a Swiss banker, Joanna Lumley is Robbie’s rich Aunt, Rob Reiner plays Jordan’s dad, Kyle Chandler plays a straight-arrow FBI man trying to bring Jordan down, Spike Jonze plays an early employer, and current Fox News ‘expert’ and former cop Bo Dietl amazingly plays himself, as he was Jordan’s own P.I. during this period.

Wrong-headed, unpleasant, but often just plain tedious 2013 film may well be the worst film to date from the respected Martin Scorsese (who has made excellent films like “Raging Bull”, “Goodfellas”, “Shine a Light”, “Hugo”, etc.) Taking the true story of Jordan Belfort (who also inspired the much better, fictionalised “Boiler Room”), Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter (TV’s “Boardwalk Empire”) treat this disgraceful jerk of a human being like he’s just a “Ferris Bueller”-style young scallywag skipping school, and by the film’s end one gets the feeling that Scorsese wholeheartedly sides with Jordan. It’s disgraceful. He’s a heartless and criminal businessman, a shameless womaniser, an even more shameless drug abuser, and all-round giant knob. What the hell was Scorsese thinking here? Some might be glad to see Scorsese tackling rather adult material for the first time in a while, but it’s not done well at all. There is absolutely nothing admirable about Jordan, at least not the Jordan in this part of his life. There is nothing about his story to take lightly or treat in a jocular, and pretty much celebratory way. And there was very little of interest for me, perhaps most importantly of all. For starters, I’m mathematically-challenged and not terribly knowledgeable about the finance industry, to be honest. I don’t care to gain much more knowledge about it, really. I couldn’t tell whether Scorsese was going for comedy or not here, but there was one thing I did know for sure: I didn’t care.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays things pretty well here, but he’s playing a smug scumbag who only gets worse. He openly brags about all of the drugs he consumes. Why? I genuinely don’t get it, and don’t care to. Jordan’s constant bragging narration sways the film too far in the direction of glorifying him, a real miscalculation the film never recovers from. Meanwhile, I like swearing, probably more than most if I’m honest, but even for me there is way too much swearing in this. It’s not credible to be using profanity so many times in one sentence, especially in the corporate world where most are presumably educated enough to have a decent vocabulary so as to know the appropriate place for and appropriate frequency of swear words. Unfortunately, Scorsese (perhaps dictated by Belfort’s text) treats all of this as a juvenile lark, not to mention it’s repetitive and far too long at around three hours. It’s really immature if you ask me, but not in any interesting or entertaining way. Scorsese should be especially ashamed of himself for the dwarf-tossing scene. If these jerks really did get up to so much shenanigans at work, Scorsese failed to convince me of it. As for the supposed humour, the only slightly funny moment in the entire film comes when DiCaprio and Hill are rendered spastic by taking too many drugs, and even then I didn’t remotely believe it actually happened to the real Belfort (And don’t even get me started on the unconvincingly mammoth amount of cocaine used in the film).

It has clearly been overpitched, with even the actors encouraged to go (too far) for broke, even DiCaprio at times. Oscar-nominee Jonah Hill is probably the worst offender, with his overly mannered and irritating performance. Considering the phony white teeth and histrionics, he comes off like a fat John Turturro (And I’m pretty sure it was intentional) and drove me nuts. It was such an annoying put-on, a disgraceful character who never convinces as an actual human being. Matthew McConaughey is lively and clearly enjoying himself, but his cameo performance didn’t do much for me. It was weird and came across as phony. The best performance by far comes from Aussie soap actress Margot Robbie, who bares all (admittedly not in close-up) and delivers a convincing Noo Yawk accent. It’s not a great role in a seriously non-feminist film, but she really is impressive here. Kyle Chandler is well-cast as a boy scout-like cop, but the role reminded me too much of Hanratty from “Catch Me If You Can”, and Jordan Belfort ain’t no Frank Abignale Jr., even though they’re both played by the same actor.

Look, Scorsese might’ve come closer to pulling this off if the film were an hour shorter and the emphasis on drugs and debauchery lessened quite considerably. However, even then the comic tone of the film offends me. This is not a funny story. It is not something to be taken light-heartedly at all. At times too stupid and phony to be offensive, Scorsese swings wildly and completely misses here by taking unpleasant characters and behaviour, and quite clearly endorsing it for reasons that I don’t even care to know. At least “Boiler Room” was smart enough to know Belfort and his like were not good guys at all (though the Belfort substitute was seen as misguided more than anything), but this film takes forever to get there and still doesn’t seem to seriously condemn the sleazy bastard. Scorsese creates the “Caligula” of Wall Street (sadly intentional, from what I’ve read), and if that’s true to life, I wasn’t buying it as such. It seemed wildly overpitched, and far too long for something so immature and repetitive (And boy is it ever repetitive after the first 45 minutes or so). Above all, it’s a crushing bore with absolutely no redeeming characters, or even interesting ones. Marty, you’ve really disappointed me here. I expect this kind of shit from De Palma, but you? You should be above this empty display of criminal excess (both the excess engaged by the characters and the excess in film length, I mean). No, I seriously disliked this one.   

Rating: D+