Not epic enough for a 3 hour film

Rating: 9/10 (19 January 2014)

I went into the theater practically shaking with excitement. DiCaprio leading with Jonah Hill supporting, that sounds great. A three hour film directed by Scorcese, sounds even better. Scorcese has never made a bad film, but I feel like he's never quite achieved the zeitgeist bending iconic director position of some of his peers (in particular, Francis Ford Coppola). Still, he's got a great list of films under his belt, and The Wolf of Wall Street, from the commercials alone, seemed like an over the top, epic romp. Flashy and Fellini-esque, the commercials depicted a wild and raunchy character study of Jordan Belfort, a real life Wall Street trickster. And with three hours of film time, I knew I was in for something grandiose, a film that captures an entire lifetime.
I was only half right in my predictions.
The film starts off at something of a wonky pace, as the film sifts through events in Belfort's initial flirtations with the Wall Street money game. An American Psycho version of Matthew McConaughey tells Belfort (DiCaprio) to masturbate twice a day and does cocaine in a restaurant. Belfort loses his job during a stock crash and winds up some morbid Long Island penny stock boiler room, which he quickly takes over with his wit and pseudo sincerity. He meets Jonah Hill, who plays this great greedy Long Island goofball who married his cousin, and the two decide to start playing the stock market in an underhanded manner to get rich quick.
The plan works, and then the movie starts. The first act of the film feels too much like a prologue, whereas I thought it would be more like The Godfather (two plot arcs in one film, which it isn't). Nothing in this first act is boring, and DiCaprio is convincing in every scene, but it meanders, which will probably turn a lot of moviegoers off.
There's also a LOT of nudity and sex. It's over the top, yeah, and sometimes even disturbing in that black comedy kind of way, but most of these scenes are jarring and unfulfilling. The party office scenes are usually disturbing (especially the one where they pay a woman to shave her head), but I wasn't sure how funny they were supposed to be.
The tone is all over the place, and the climax, a cartoonish drug episode, feels out of place and without weight despite how funny and well acted it is. The characters, even when faced with dire situations, never seem to care, and the high stakes never feel very high. There's little tension, yet the elaborate scenes and tone are never extraordinary enough to pass for "style as substance." DiCaprio's character just kind of meanders throughout scenes, being an attractive jerk, doing drugs, having sex, spending money, breaking hearts. And it all looks good, it's shot very well, and I personally was never bored, but it's ultimately unsatisfying. It just doesn't push the excess enough to be crazy (Fellini Satyricon, Spring Breakers), and the script is average.
What saves the film is DiCaprio and Hill, what a strange and wonderful pair. Scenes with just the two of them bickering and doing drugs are the highlights of the film. Definitely for fans of those two, but there's not much for anyone else. Not a lot of plot, not a lot of style, it just does not feel epic enough to be three hours.
If anything, American Hustle was the better sort-of crime dramedy of 2013, just because it had a tighter script and more cohesive tone (and Jennifer Lawrence).