The basic plot follows Jordan Belfort (Leonardo Di Caprio)
when he joins a stockbrockers a short period before the wall street crash that occurred
in the mid 1980’s. Following that he sets up his own firm, selling penny shares
to regular people. Needless to say some of the firms actions aren’t legal,
something that attracts the eagle eyes attention of the FBI.
The film revolves around Di Caprio’s Belfort, a man who is
self admittedly obsessed with money and classes it as his biggest addiction,
when you see just how badly he is addicted to other substances you realise just
how big of statement this is. How much he changes or evolves throughout the
film is hard to say, as he is driven by greed mainly and is much more
interested in having as good a time as is physically possible. There are points
that stand out as some of Di Caprio’s best work, more often than not, these are
comic moments. The highlight being the quaalude scene toward the end of the
film, which combines great physical comedy and perfectly delivered voice over.
It’s hard to make cerebral palsy funny, but they pull it off here.
Belfort is never played sympathetically, as he has numerous
chances to do the right thing, but instead decides to continue his course of
money, sex and drugs. Di Caprio, Scorcese and Terence Winter deserve credit for
trying to make him interesting and charismatic as opposed to immediately
likeable, as a result the film benefits from this.
The film is excessive, a hard eighteen, which had to be cut
to make that rating. With a film this explicit, you have to ask if it’s justified
and needed. While they could have done without some of the shots, it would have
lessened the world and the characters, as we wouldn’t see them acting how they truly
are, no matter how crazed and out of control they are. More out of control than
the actions, is the language, which ranges from mildly offensive to machine gun
like speed of four letter word insults. The line that demonstrates this is when
one of the brokers sees an attractive woman and comments, “I’d let her give me
AIDS”. I think that sums up the kind of language you should expect.
The film is three hours long, but unlike recent films that
clock up that kind of run time, this one doesn’t feels its length. The final
half hour slows down as the severity of the situation begins to tell on Belfort
and the rest of the characters. But by then you are so engrossed and involved
in these people that another hour would have flown past.
Scorcese and Winter here have combined to create a truly
great film and possibly Scorcese’s best in the last decade. It takes a very
serious subject and makes it different to what it would have been in the hands of a lesser calibre of
writer/director team. To put it into context, this film could easily form a
loose kind of trilogy with Casino and
Goodfellas, albeit with different enterpretations of the American dream and
organized crime, with The Wolf of Wall
Street using Wall Street as the criminals instead of mobsters.
Don’t be put off by the length or the apparent seriousness
of the subject matter. Go and experience one of the funniest (albeit darkly
comic) and best made films of the year.
Director: Martin Scorcese
Writer(s): Terence Winter (screenplay) and Jordan Belfort
(book).
