Not Marty's best work, more flash than substance

Rating: 7/10 (12 January 2014)

It's comforting to imagine that everything Martin Scorsese touches turns to gold, but it's not true. The same rules of thoroughness that apply to every other filmmaker also apply to Scorsese. If he rushes through a compressed editing schedule to meet an Oscar-friendly release date – as he did on The Wolf of Wall Street – his work suffers. Scorsese's latest clocks in at 180 minutes, not because its characters or narrative demand that kind of exhaustive treatment, but because Scorsese didn't have time to find a more focused, impactful shape for the film. Exploring the personal and professional corruption of notorious stockbroker Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street has several memorable sequences, but it plays like a clumsy, repetitive work-in-progress.
Praise has already been heaped upon Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill for their charismatic performances, but it's important to note that this is wacky comic acting more concerned with eliciting shock and amusement than any deeper human truth. This miscalculation of emphasis also infects the storytelling in a more general sense. Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter focus nearly all of their attention on the excesses – sex, drugs, greed – that drive these characters, rarely placing them in a context that might reveal complicating texture or shading. It's perfectly logical to portray these characters as one-note imbeciles with an absence of inner life, but this also makes for stifling, unsatisfying drama.
The Wolf of Wall Street never finds its bearings, but it becomes more tolerable in its second half when Belfort finally encounters some resistance (in the form of FBI agent Patrick Denham, played by Kyle Chandler) and sees his warped life of excess start to unravel. But even then, the film is dragged down by its reliance on Belfort's moronic perspective – the film is derived from his self-mythologizing memoir – which gives an Animal House frivolity to his constant misbehaviour, a smokescreen that distracts from the devastation of his professional crimes.
Simply recycling sensibilities from Goodfellas and The Departed may seem like a logical strategy, but there's a crucial difference this time around. Whereas gangsters generally do harm to other gangsters, Belfort's victims are relatively innocent, draining this film's lawlessness of charm and fascination. Scorsese's ability to find humanity in reprehensible characters has always been one of his greatest strengths, but he doesn't even attempt to humanize the characters in The Wolf of Wall Street. This wilful oversight results in one of the director's most disposable, nihilistic films, a half-hearted effort that abandons the complexities of his own world view in favour of Belfort's clueless primitivism. This might have made for a uniquely compelling Todd Phillips (The Hangover) movie, but in the hands of Scorsese, this mildly entertaining diversion feels hopelessly erratic and insubstantial.