The Wolf of Wall Street

Jordan Belfort likes fast cars, blow jobs from blondes, and occasionally crashing his helicopter in his mansion’s yard. You remember the type, right? The kind of Wall Street alpha male of the late 1980s and early 1990s who worked hard, played harder and puffed coke up a hooker’s ass the hardest of all?

If that name rings a bell, it’s because either you have read Belfort’s 2007 memoir, The Wolf of Wall Street, or you were among those burned by his pump-and-dump schemes back in the day.

As Belfort tells it here (via Terence Winter’s screenplay), the young broker was about to embark on a stratospheric rise at a prestigious brokerage firm when Black Monday hit in October 1987. After that, he joined a small-fry penny-stock joint on Long Island and found his true calling. An instant master of the slick smile-and-dial technique, he also had a knack for inspiring legions of brokers to follow him merrily to hell. The result: success beyond his wildest dreams. Also: FBI investigations, drug addictions, Swiss-banking shenanigans, backstabbing, euphoria, paranoia, rock bottom — and, eventually, reinvention as a Tom Wu-like motivational speaker. Belfort could have been just another handsome prick chasing the go-go ’90s version of the American dream. Instead, he became the ultimate Horatio Alger poster boy for assholes.

And who better to recount Belfort’s rise and fall for the big screen than Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese? Petulant boy kings, the ones with million-dollar smiles and $5 moral compasses, have become the actor’s post-Titanic specialty, and there’s nothing that our greatest living auteur loves more than tales of empires betrayed and turned to dust. The Wolf of Wall Street has all of this in spades — it’s Satyricon on the corner of Broadway and Morris. The voice-overs that follow the surreally vulgar opening — an office party in which little people are used as human darts — channel the kind of knowing, those-were-the-days wistfulness that lent such an ironic edge to Scorsese’s great magnum opus of men behaving badly. You settle in, thrilled at the prospect of seeing the Goodfellas of boiler-room movies.

Then you realize that you’re getting the Casino of boiler-room movies.

Wolf is a bloated, rambling, shapeless epic, and it’s way too high on its own excesses. Now, Marty’s Excellent Vegas Adventure of course has its partisans, and it’s a memorable picture. When you recall Scorsese’s 1995 attempt to throw his arms around Sin City, you think of his swooping camera movements and those God’s-eye shots of chips falling where they may, of salmon-colored suits and Sharon Stone slurring and heads being crushed in vises. Wolf, too, turns glorious douchebaggery into astonishing moments of cinema. But, like Casino, it also blurs the line between reveling in and condemning the characters’ pathological conspicuous consumption, and the storytelling fails. What should be (like Goodfellas) a look at an Icarus in free fall turns into an endless eighth-circle tour, a journey not of narrative but of basic endurance.

There are thrilling pinprick moments on this long road to nowhere: snake-oil mentor Matthew McConaughey’s long, “tootsky”-fueled monologue (“How many times you jerk off a week?”), which ends in literal chest-thumping; a sequence of insane post-flush bacchanalia, eerily set to Elmore James’ rendition of “Dust My Broom”; Belfort’s nouveau-riche jerk meeting his Euro-aristocratic counterpart in corrupted values, played by none other than AbFab‘s Joanna Lumley; Jonah Hill in a pair of mom jeans, casually riffing on marrying his cousin and cajoling his co-star to “smoke crack with me, bro” in a cramped telephone booth.

And let us now praise slightly less-famous men: If anyone comes out of this a winner, it’s Hill, who goes full-metal-gonzo in the role of Donnie Azoff, Belfort’s partner in crime. The Judd Apatow staple has never been shy about proclaiming his love for Scorsese’s work and, given the chance to play a loose cannon for il maestro, the actor invests the supporting role with all the nerdiness, open lust for WASP-ish belonging, and delight in being handed the kingdom’s keys that the part requires. If DiCaprio really is Scorsese’s new De Niro, as critics have long suggested, it would seem that the filmmaker has now found his new Joe Pesci as well.

Yes, it’s churlish to complain when so few modern filmmakers are capable of giving us such sublime, baroque go-for-brokeness, of making us gasp the way Scorsese makes us gasp. But for every one of Wolf‘s undeniably hair-raising moments, you sit through a dozen listless scenes of hedonism for hedonism’s sake, or lengthy sequences like a late-act Quaalude overdose that extends any sense of suspense or black humor or high-stakes danger way past the give-a-shit point. Even if you pitch everything at the level of nerve-jangling, it simply becomes three hours of white noise. There’s a reason that the jittery, druggy nightmare in Goodfellas is consigned to the film’s final act.

A priest once told the staunchly Catholic director that his films were too much Good Friday, not enough Easter Sunday. The Wolf of Wall Street does narrow its bleary, bloodshot eyes on Good Friday, but only on the centurions who rolled dice for Christ’s robes at the Crucifixion. Fair enough. But how much can the market bear when it comes to watching scumbags get rich and feel no remorse? Are we supposed to somehow learn a lesson by proxy? This could have been a focused, fine-tuned notion of how the “greed is good” ideology gave way to a feral hunger that ate our economy’s bottom out. Instead, we’re left sifting through a predatory tale that’s unwieldy, unsteady and ultimately unsatisfying — a tottering hippo in wolf’s clothing.