'Wolf of Wall Street' Film Review

January 2014

The Wolf of Wall Street aims to shock - the men the film depicts did nearly everything, however outrageous, it shows them doing. Based on the memoir of the same name, it recounts how Jordan Belfort built a company around the illegal practice of selling stocks of companies he knew would soon be worthless and keeping the profits while his investors suffered losses. In the process, he became a multimillionaire by his mid-20s, was convicted and jailed for stock fraud and in between redefined the meaning of the word ‘debauchery.’ How he achieved this third end is the focus of much of the film with the result that, despite some notable performances, it remains largely static for most of its three hour runtime.

Leonardo DiCaprio was arguably the most deserving award recipient at this year’s Golden Globes, not because he has been largely overlooked in the past, but because he fleshes out a character who screenwriter Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire; The Sopranos) renders one dimensional. By the end of the film the viewer has learned nothing about Jordan Belfort that isn’t presented in the opening monologue and sees him undergo no development. That DiCaprio occupies every scene both physically and through his voice-over narration and still manages to keep Belfort interesting is a testament to his ability as an actor. But as fellow Globe winner Bryan Cranston said, “An actor can only raise the level of bad writing by a grade. C writing and I don’t care if you’re Meryl Streep - you can only raise it to a B.”

Indeed, the film’s saving grace is its panoply of sharply-executed performances including a delightfully explosive Rob Reiner and, most memorably, Matthew McConaughey, who melds his usual charm with a 1980s stockbroker’s cynicism (“The money’s great and everything but,… after a while it gets kinda monotonous…I promise you that cocaine can definitely help you get through the day around here”). Jonah Hill has been rightfully nominated for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as Belmont’s right-hand man Donnie Azoff. It would come naturally to play this character - who in one scene, to punish a stockbroker’s insufficient work ethic, eats the worker’s goldfish – excessively over-the-top. But Hill seems to understand the patent insecurity that comes with maniacally huge egos and, like DiCaprio, knows when to soften his tone almost to the point of pleading.

Character pieces about “men of large appetites” have long been director Martin Scorsese’s trademark with the ability to subtly illustrate their anguish his strength. (Take, for example, the famous moment in Taxi Driver when, as Travis Bickle (Robert de Niro) endures a phone conversation that breaks his heart, the camera slowly pulls away because it is too saddening to watch). But not once does Scorsese employ this skill to underline how Belfort’s greed and debauchery facilitate his deterioration. An early scene in which he entertains his cohorts with a game of “dwarf-tossing” could easily substitute a later one in which he pays a female stockbroker a bonus to shave her head and vice versa. In different scenes he wrecks his helicopter, car and yacht in frenzies that simply demonstrate what he outright admits in the film’s first five minutes. The result is that most of the film plays like a series of variations of the same scene.

Thelma Schoonmaker – Scorsese’s editor since Raging Bull – admits that part of the reason for this excess was indeed the dexterity of the actors. “If we had a little more time [in the post-production rush] maybe we could have gotten a little more out. I don’t know. But I have kept the long cuts for the actors because they did so many wonderful things. I want them to see them.” Another reason given is the fact that what is shown on film actually happened and was therefore worth recreating. But by this standard the movie is incomplete. Not once does it give mention to the investors conned by Stratton Oakmont - the name of Belfort’s company - some of whom belonged to the wealthiest one percent and many lower-middle class elderly folks who did not, losing most or all of their life savings in the process. The phony million-dollar prize that Bruce Dern’s desperate Woody Grant chases in Nebraska could have easily been substituted with a Stratton-Oakmont investment opportunity.

Multiple times throughout the film the viewer sees a sequence as lived by a substance-infused Belfort, followed by his realization of how it actually occurred. (He drives home safely while paralyzed by Quaaludes only to discover his car and half the town in shambles; he prevents a heavily inebriated Donnie from molesting a flight attendant but by the next scene is tightly strapped to his airplane chair, realizing he was the perpetrator). This motif could have artfully served as a parallel for this entire period, a long party that led to the diminishment of many, the conman comprehending how at the same time that he felt his glory fully realized it was in fact gradually deteriorating. But perhaps this would have interrupted the kind of lighting-pulse energy with which Scorsese sought to infuse the film. Ultimately, it misses the chance to use cinema to illustrate the multiple dimensions of this story out of the near mania with which it recreates just one of them.