Ryan McNeil
Early in THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, the keys to being a successful trader are laid out. As crackerjack broker Mark Hanna explains the game, he points out that there are things one needs to do to get the money from a client’s pocket into one’s own pocket. The first is to develop a healthy drug habit, which will give one the speed and energy they need to keep up with the breakneck pace of things. His other suggestion is to make sure one releases the tension regularly, since the stress could easily make a person implode. How is a young, wealthy, and handsome person supposed to release tension?
Mark Hanna suggests jerking-off.
The protégé Hanna is bestowing this wisdom to is named Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio). The film begins with him landing a job at a blue chip Wall Street firm, but within short order finding himself out of work in the wake of Black Monday. In searching for a new job, Belfort discovers a storefront trading firm in Long Island that is making its bones offering penny stocks to average joes. In short order, Belfort is struck with a dastardly idea: He will build a company that combines the mark-up of the penny stocks, the targeted clientèle of the storefront firm, and the high-stakes allure of a Fortune 500 firm.
A lucrative idea? Absolutely. A legal idea? Hell no.
Legaities aside, Belfort builds his shop from people he knows well. Mostly friends from his old neighbourhood, with a newcomer thrown in: Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill), a neighbour whose moxie Belfort admires. As business picks up, everyone’s lifestyle takes an upward tick. The money seems endless and the parties are frequent. Belfort even gives his personal life a fresh coat of paint by separating from his longtime wife Teresa (Cristin Milloti), and going off instead with a flashier woman in the form of Naomi (Margot Robbie).
It certainly seems to all involved as though last call will never arrive and that the party will never end. It’s right around then that Belfort and his operation get the attention of FBI agent Patrick Denham (Kyle Chandler).
What goes up…
One could be forgiven if they walked away from THE WOLF OF WALL STREET and felt as though they’d been witness to excess. It is the longest film that Martin Scorsese has ever unleashed (beating CASINO by a whopping two minutes), and much of that runtime is dedicated to an obscene amount of debauchery. There are enough lewd acts to make the cast of SPRING BREAKERS blush. There is more drug use than the Rolling Stones’ 1972 tour. There is enough indulgence and opulence on display, that one can almost hear Donald Trump in the back row saying “Too much.”. It’s almost enough to put one off the film entirely – but therein lays the point. To really drive home the insanity, abundance, and immorality of Jordan Belfot’s life, we have to witness it to the fullest extent.
THE WOLF OF WALL STREET uses that level of bombast and scale to drive home its ultimate point, which is just how much Jordan has lost his moral compass. If there is ever a doubt as to how immoral (and often completely nuts) what we’re witnessing is, Scorsese has DiCaprio look straight to camera and demonstrate it. When he does he underlines just how far one can get with a sharp wit and an impish glint. When he does, he demonstrates just how charming he is, and how easy it must be for someone like him to separate an average person from their hard-earned cash. In some ways, we see that the technique Jordan employs isn’t all that different from a pick-up artist trying to score with a woman in a crowded club. DiCaprio almost exhausts us with what he has to say, and once or twice he even seems to get that and skips a few gory details. However for all of his talking, he very seldom says anything with any weight or truth to it: not to his father, not to his wives, not to his friends, not to the feds, and certainly not to us.
In the film’s final moments, as we take a moment to see what comes next for Belfort and what comes next for Denham. As these moments play out, and the film cuts to black, I felt…repulsed. As I came to grips with that queasy feeling, it occurred to me that we’ve never felt that way after a Scorsese film before. I’ve spent hours upon hours watching murderers, gamblers, thieves, drug dealers, philanderers, sociopaths, liars, punks and hoods. I have watched them all profess to be moral people while still committing deeply immoral acts. Through it all though, there has been a strange nobility to what they have done.
On the contrary, there is no trace of nobility in Belfort. Everything he’s doing, he’s doing for himself even if he tells himself that he’s doing it for his family. He has stolen-and-spent on such a massive scale, that he has to jump through hoops to disguise it all. Perhaps what’s worst of all, he doesn’t take the out he is handed – even if it will allow him to keep much of what he has built – all in the name of pride and glory.
He is one of the most distinguished characters Scorsese has ever captured, and likewise one of the most repugnant.
When you put it all together, it’s clear that Jordan – and many in the real world just like him – took Mark Hanna’s advice and ran with it as far as he could. People like him work hard for the money the have amass, there’s no denying that. They have earned the right to find a release from the stress. Unfortunately though, the release they seek isn’t one of fulfilment, family, or fellowship. Whether they throw little people, knock down martinis, or do enough drugs knock out a horse, the fact remains that they might know how to make a living but they don’t know how to live with what they’ve made.
In the end, all they can do is continue jerking-off.
I liked it but I as well felt that repulusion. But i think I felt it much earlier, and it had set in full force by the time domestic violence was occurring on screen. I don’t think I find the same joy in excess others do. I quickly tired of it in The Great Gatsby, I hate Spring Breakers with every fibre of my being, there’s the much noted uber destruction of Man of Steel and countless other shoot em ups… When i find myself numb to what’s happening, I just can’t find it to be a feature. I get bored. Quite possibly this mindset has kept me away from a number of vices, but when I find myself getting bored by things that inherently not supposed to be boring, I can’t help but become preoccupied by my awareness of the numb feeling, and then you start picking apart everything.
In the case of WoWS, and to look back to This is 40 last year, I find Scorsese and Apatow too in love with every scene, or too in love with their extended cast to cut some roles down. The vast majority of scenes linger on longer than necessary. WoWS shows you stuff it just told you in ways that don’t give it any new life. The scene where Leo and Jonah are heavily numbed to drugs, reaching for the phone and screaming started to resemble Freddy Got Fingered, and yet Tom Green might have known better about when to say ‘enough is enough, let’s move on’ than Marty did.
I like the movie, will definitely own it and rewatch it several times, and maybe the excess will be easier for me to digest when I can take a break. I watched the Pirate sequels for the first time this week at home, and those are definitely excessive films, and they benefitted from that environment. But as a straight 3 hour watch, I felt it could use another scalpel approach editing pass to the whole thing, which as it stands currently feels 2 Hobbit movies long.
I think you’ve hit upon the nature of depicting excess: does it serve a purpose?
If the reason behind the excess we’re forced to watch is to drag a set piece out and go haywire with effects, then I agree with you that such things should be trimmed back. However, where WOLF and two other films you mention are concerned (BREAKERS and GATSBY), the excess is there to drive home a point about how much the protagonists have lost the plot.
Were Korine, Luhrmann, or Scorsese to shave things down, I fear their films would become an ode to their flawed characters, instead of being condemnations.
“I think you’ve hit upon the nature of depicting excess: does it serve a purpose?”
In all cases those who enjoy them talk about how wonderfully entertaining they are, so ‘being entertaining’ is one of those purposes as well. If we’ve become numb or repulsed to the point where we’re not entertained, it’s a problem, isn’t it? There has to be a point where a reasonable person has understood the focus and it’s time to either move on or have some other level or theme.
I think that “I get the point” idea is why Andrew James tunes out of so many documentaries early, and I get why. Many of them do indeed get repetitive, allowing one to become “numb” to horrific acts or charismatic people, lacking a theme or change in the subject/story over the course of the film.
Not that WoWS lacks a ‘theme’, but for a good while as it’s going my brain is BUSY, both being entertained and educated on a base level while thinking about everything from Occupy to the 2008 collapse and the Internet age and my dad’s own failed experiment with stocks, etc, etc. The film is so long that I’d either already plowed through the layers or grown weary of those layers, and then I start noticing flaws in the latter half that may have also been in the first half. Flaws I may have noticed if I hadn’t been mentally active.
I think there are more than a few films out there that on rewatch don’t seem as great because we’ve already gone through the mental gymnastics that come in tandem with a first time watch.
Man, I had a blast watching this film. It was like the ultimate party gone wrong. Not to mention that there were moments in that film that proved that even Scorsese can do low-brow humor at its most repulsive. I’m convinced that Leonardo diCaprio should do more comedies because he’s got the gift to be a very funny guy and he proved it with this film. I’m not going to spoil anything but what he does in that film with those drugs is just unforgettable.
He plays a slime really well, doesn’t he?
He needs to play Vince McMahon one day.
I would absolutely pay to see that. Leo as Vince. I can see him making an ass of himself and getting a stunner from Stone Cold Steve Austin.
I love that this movie was “too much”. I feel like everyone in the film industry feels the need to be restricted and restrained, but this movie was just a disgustingly beautiful mess that it is kind of…groundbreaking. I don’t know. I loved it to pieces. It is the king of all of the “look at my shit” movies that have been so in vogue this year. And yes, I too felt repulsed by it.
It’s going to take a little while for me to bend my brain around you being allowed into movies with this sort of rating.
Your “look at my shit” reference reminded me about something” People like you and I were left queasy after this film, but what do you want to bet some future trader makes sure that his tripped-out pad has “Wolf of Wall Street playing on repeat, yo!” ?
Trust me, it took me quite some time to get over the fact that I was watching an R18 movie. Shame is that I wasn’t even asked for ID at the theatre…I’ve waited my entire life to be ID’ed at a cinema.
And yes, I can definitely see that happening.
Ryan, if this were your movie, would you have made it three hours long?
I might have.
The funny thing about length is that I feel like it only plays an issue on first viewing. So when it comes to films I love and have watched several times – HEAT, for instance – I’m surprised at how the minutes seem to fly by.
Scorsese’s films are usually on the lengthy side anyway, so I went in expecting something epic.
I saw a really great point about this film from the FilmCritHulk on Twitter, and I think he’s 100% accurate. If this had been made by a director in their 20s (or even 30s), we’d all be talking about a new cinematic movement. (let’s forget for a second that a 20-something wouldn’t have the reputation or caché to get a studio to fund this film). It’s a trojan horse of a film. Frankly, I found a lot of it hilarious, sort of an epic 3 hour version of a Judd Apatow movie, or a drugs-and-frat-house comedy. But just when you start to laugh, it hits you with something massively uncomfortable (Corey’s reference to the domestic abuse, for instance, or the cringe-worthy scene with the child in the car).
If this film has a totem, it’s the scene with the helicopter exploding while Belfort looks on from the rescue boat amid a drunken, celebratory orgy. People died- it’s a serious situation- and he’s drowning in a sea of excess.
I think it’s as good as Scorsese’s been in a very long time, possibly even all the way back to Goodfellas. And really, showing the hard reality of horrible characters is kind of Scorsese’s thing. Henry Hill gets half a film glorifying his life, and then half a film with it unraveling at warp speed before he ends up in witness protection. Travis Bickle is a hero to the public (as witnessed in the newspaper clipping at the end) but we, the audience, know so much better. We know he was a warped, vigilante monster. Even Howard Hughes is neurotic, obsessed, and chased by demons rather than a millionaire playboy. Jake LaMotta’s a hero only in the ring; outside it, he’s a jealous wreck. And on and on.
…and yet, as terrible as those characters were, I still felt pathos for them and identified with their struggle. It took Jordan to really turn-in a Scorsese character that I felt disgusted with.
You’re right though – if this film had a name on the bottom like Rian Johnson or Edgar Wright, people would be calling it a new masterpiece.
I think for me the totem is Jordan’s final rallying speech. That moment where he can cut a deal and make a getaway, but mid-speech decides that he’s going to stay and hold tightly to the empire he has built. It’s a moment we’ve seen in a lot of crime movies, where the crook has it all, but risks it out of pride. What might have been had he taken the deal?
This movie was so much fun for me, however, I can see why someone wouldn’t like this. It is long and it can be repetitive, but I don’t think I stopped smiling during this once. Good review Ryan.
Mighta been long, but it had my fullest attention for every minute of it.
what did you guys think of the era details. I had some issues with the sense of passage of time. I don’t expect “HEY ITS THE LATE 80S!” obvious callbacks especially since so many people are in suits most of the time, but I didn’t get that feel very often regardless. And the music cues didn’t help as much either when it’s supposed to be 1992 or something and Marty is playing “Everlong”.
And if you’re gonna use a 1997 song in THIS movie, come on, Marty – Semi-Charmed Life! Semi-Charmed Life!
Ha! I love that closing line, Ryan. That’s fantastic. I wondered where you were going with the set-up of the review and then you doubled back to it perfectly. What an excellent summation of Jordan’s world.
“…one can almost hear Donald Trump in the back row saying ‘Too much.'” Didn’t you think Scorsese setting the dissolution of Jordan’s first marriage on the curb of Trump Tower was on-purpose irony? I’m convinced it had to be.
(Sorry – this comment somehow got past me)
I’m not sure if he was taking a direct swipe or not. Living in Trump Towers is one of those signs that a person “has arrived” right? So regardless of whether it’s factually accurate or not, I thought it was a very telling touch – and a layered one at that:
Just because the people who live there are loaded, doesn’t mean they have their shit together. Far from it, probably.
I just stumbled on this review from your Recommended Viewing scroll. My thoughts exactly! I haven’t seen the film since it came out, and I enjoyed revisiting it through your review. WoWS works precisely because it shows us unfiltered excess. To watch the film is to feel thrilled, and then disgusted by the fact that one feels thrilled.
However, I would say that GoodFellas made me feel the same way. And I do think this is his best film since then (though I don’t think people talk about CAPE FEAR enough). But I didn’t feel for Henry Hill by the end of that film. I actually think it accomplishes the same thing as this one, in making us join Henry’s journey for the first portion of the film, only to become horrified once we realize what we signed up for. Tommy shooting Spider always feels like the significant turning point for me in that film. And part of what makes GoodFellas so successful is that Scorsese warns us right in the beginning: we see the ‘heroes’ commit a brutal murder in a flash-forward, then jump into the backstory. It’s a brilliant writing choice.
I don’t remember WoWS well enough to think about the nuances of its plot development, but I do remember thinking to myself, at some point during its massively long runtime, ‘When is this all going to end?’ Then when it did end, I reflected back on that thought and realized I was supposed to have it. SPOILER ALERT: When the film ends, Jordan may not be trading stocks anymore, but he’s still walking around in the world, making money for talking and not really paying for all the destruction he caused. So when is it going to end?
First of all, I should say thanks because I think in the six months I’ve been posting ‘Recommended Viewing’ links, this is the first comment to come from those prompts! So thanks for reading 🙂
I think your point about wondering when it’s going to end is what makes both films stick with us the way they do. I’ve only watched WOLF properly one time in the year since this entry, and twice more “in the background”. It doesn’t open with the same sort of romanticism as GOODFELLAS, and I think that’s part of its appeal. We’d never look at killers and think “I wanna be them”, but yet we do look at white collar success stories and want what they have; the homes, the clothes, the beautiful spouses, etc.
So perhaps the best thing about WOLF is that it underlines this “other type of criminal” and shows them for what they are; deplorable…much as we might not want to notice it at first blush.
Thanks for reading good sir, and for the comment