Excessive but Lacking

Rating: 5/10 (31 January 2014)

The Wolf of Wall Street is undoubtedly one of the funniest films ever made by director Martin Scorsese. Unfortunately, it is not one of his best. Clocking in at a whopping 180 minutes, Wolf is too much of everything: sex, drugs, profanity, laughs, dialogue, improvisation, narration.
If you've been following the development and release of Scorsese's latest, chances are you know all about the four-to-five hour, NC-17- rated cut that had to be trimmed down hastily for a Christmas day release. While legendary editor and Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker's editing is certainly not lacking in imagination, she and Scorsese let scenes run on entirely too long, cutting back and forth between actors who are clearly making it all up as they go along. Most of the time, the actors appear to be having a great time with the freedom they've been given by their director. Leonardo DiCaprio, in particular, gives an absolutely fearless performance, and he is clearly enjoying himself. If only the audience had such a luxury.
For its first hour or so, Wolf acclimates its viewers to its brisk pacing and no-holds barred storytelling. For the next hour and a half, however, the story falls victim to a "rinse-and repeat" method of constantly regurgitating its themes, scenes, and dialogue, until the inevitable ending provides some relief from its relentless pace.
Wolf tells the story of Jordan Belfort, a Wall Street con artist who dreams of being a rich broker like Henry Hill dreamed of being a gangster in Scorsese's Goodfellas (more on the similarities between these two films later). After losing a promising job in the recession of the late 1980's Jordan learns the tricks (literally) of the trade at a small operation selling penny stocks. Whereas larger, more regulated stocks yield a much smaller commission, "penny stocks" provide a 50% commission for their brokers, who in turn sell an inferior product to gullible investors. Jordan's bright idea is to sell these cheap stocks in huge quantities to much wealthier clients, reaping a huge take for his new front-of-a-firm, Stratton Oakmont.
Needless to say, the plan works for a while, and Belfort and his partners, including Donnie Azoff (played by a joyously weird Jonah Hill) become unfathomably rich. The remainder of the film is basically a visual orgy of gratuitous (and I mean "I-can't-believe-they-got-away- with-this) sex and drugs, set against the backdrop of an FBI investigation into Belfort's dubious business practices.
Perhaps the biggest issue I had with the film is just how gratuitous the edgy material was. Let us compare to a movie like Goodfellas, for instance. That film shows multiple murders, often with characters meeting their demise by gunshots to the head. It also features copious amounts of cocaine consumption, along with about as many f-bombs as you'll ever hear. However, one could make the argument that for the sake of the story, all of these elements are necessary in their fullness. When Henry Hill dabbles in unauthorized cocaine and arms dealing, especially after his best friend gets bumped off, the stakes become raised: one has the very clear understanding that in this world, one wrong move can result in death.
The Wolf of Wall Street, on the other hand, shows relatively little in the way of consequences. For all the laws broken, all the drugs and hookers used up by the male characters, the biggest threat facing the supposed protagonists is possible jail time. A film that mimics the structure and feel of Goodfellas would do well to up the ante a bit, but Wolf falls woefully short in this regard.
This is not to say that there are no consequences. Belfort's unraveling is spectacular, particularly in a late scene in which he tries to leave his mansion with his young daughter in tow. But after two and a half hours of debauchery, a small portion of comeuppance seems like a lack of balance—or poetic justice. This lack of justice is exactly Scorsese's point: for the vastly wealthy, there are often no tangible or justified consequences. Scorsese does a great job of not condemning or judging his characters—he simply shows them as they are, rather objectively, and they condemn themselves with their frat-boy antics. However, the director's overlong dive into a world of excess at times seems a somewhat unhealthy fascination.
The debate over The Wolf of Wall Street is currently raging online. Variety is now running two pieces debating whether the film glorifies its characters' depravity. Some say this is Wolf's genius—an ambiguous presentation of both the temptations of sin and the obvious consequences of those who give in to it. Others would argue that people are giving Scorsese too much credit for what is ultimately an uneven tale with no dramatic drive. I count myself among the latter.
There's a classic sequence toward the end of Goodfellas in which Henry lives in a constant state of paranoia—first as the result of his drug use and later because he has agreed to rat out all of his friends to join the Witness Protection Program. These scenes are key for the arc of the story—both to illustrate the dangerous stakes and to drive the narrative toward its conclusion. The Wolf of Wall Street should have had such a sequence. Instead, we were given just another scene with cocaine and sex.