Excess to the extreme.

Rating: 10/10 (8 October 2018)

My first exposure to The Wolf of Wall Street came when I saw a trailer for the film attached to World War Z and while I certainly thought the movie looked interesting, I wasn't sold on it due to the content I was seeing so I avoided the movie when it first came out and didn't watch it until earlier this year and while I was taken aback by the sheer amount of explicit content in a few scenes, I absolutely loved the movie. From it's solid directing and fast-paced humor to its incredible acting and story, The Wolf of Wall Street is another cinematic home run for Martin Scorsese.
The film starts in 1987 where a young man named Jordan Belfort gets a job working as a stockbroker for a stock company called L.F. Rothschild where he is hired to work under Mark Hanna who introduces Jordan to the drug and sex-fueled broker culture and plants the idea in Jordan's head that making money for one's self is a stockbroker's ultimate goal and that enough is never enough. With these words in mind, Belfort goes to work but following Black Monday, his career is terminated and gets a job at a small brokerage firm company. Thanks to his combative pitching style, Jordan begins to profit but soon forms his own investment broker company with a few friends called Stratton Oakmont. After posting an ad, hundreds of young brokers come flocking to Belfort's company. As a result of the business profiting, Jordan and his entourage profit handsomely from it and soon descend into a life of drugs and women with Jordan even cheating on his own wife. Meanwhile, the FBI and the SEC begin investigating Belfort's firm and start to clamp down on the corporation which leads Jordan to try and find a way to keep his firm and his money from collapsing while also dealing with his own personal issues.
Given the unsubtle condemnation of the Wall Street stockbroker approach and lifestyle in Oliver Stone's 1987 movie, Wall Street, it would seem to clarify the basis of The Wolf of Wall Street, a movie that makes all of Oliver Stone's most barbarous neutering of the overindulgence on the stock exchange look like a walk in the park by comparison. Truly, the movie all but instantly endorses this in an early scene where an editorial is advertising a colossal uptick in job applications at Jordan's firm. So, with the need for the movie to go much more larger and colossal in terms of showing the decline of a character like Belfort, the movie shows him literally snorting cocaine out the body of a women and yet by some means continues to go downhill further and further until he is waist-deep in self-indulgence and extravagance. Despite the movie feeling endlessly long and overly bouncy sometimes, it's also a film that is grueling as well as intoxicating to watch and while it may feel less like an organized story and more like an almost three-hour decadence agenda, it still nonetheless carries it's own cinematic weight and gives the viewer a masterpiece of storytelling and character drama not seen since The Godfather.
Martin Scorsese is easily one of the greatest directors still working today and The Wolf of Wall Street just keeps on showing us why he is such an incredible director and storyteller with an almost absurd amount of excitement and passion for the art of filmmaking. In a lot of ways, The Wolf of Wall Street feels like something of a follow-up to two of his most beloved and acclaimed movies, Casino and Goodfellas even though the movie takes place in its own universe and Jordan Belfort is a professional convict who does more harm with a pen than a gun in the film. Despite that, all three movies survive as Martin's own disembowelment of the cynicism of the American Dream and much like Goodfellas, The Wolf of Wall Street grants the viewer entry into a symbolically glittering world. Much like the casinos of Las Vegas in Casino or the Irish Mob of Boston in The Departed, Wall Street is depicted as a bona fide playground for those people with no moral high ground. Sex, drugs, and money are all here and are frequently shown on screen, sometimes even in the same scene which can be a bit unsettling for some viewers but is necessary to progress the story and the characters. Much like several of his other movies, Scorsese feels less concerned with the methods Belfort makes his money and more with how money and power can corrupt a person no matter their social background. Early on in the film, some of the characters are having a conversation about tossing short people at targets for their own delight and going through what can or can't be done in terms of entertainment. Selfishness and fraud are depicted here as wide-ranging and irresistible as Jordan's decadence is nothing short of outlandish but it also encompasses every single last inch of his company so much so that there have to be sighs in the bathrooms outlawing lovemaking and even Belfort's butler gets dragged into the cycle of sex, drugs and cash driving home the point that even the most cultured people can become contaminated by power and greed. Of course, the movie is quite honest about it's leading character, Jordan Belfort who may seem like your typical lawbreaker and scam artist but is also an erratic storyteller. The film engages interest to this continuously, most noticeably in the contrast between his interpretation of a drug-hazed drive home and what actually happened along with the ramifications of that drive. In lieu of presenting an accurate and fair depiction of Jordan's behavior, the movie cleverly allows him to give his own account of what is happening onscreen. As such, The Wolf of Wall Street gives Belfort small apologetic moments sprinkled within his flashes of harshness, antipathy, sexism, anger, and cold-bloodiness. Easily one of the best film characters ever to grace the silver screen.
While The Wolf of Wall Street may feel like a heavenly accomplice to some of Scorsese's earlier movies, it's obvious with this movie and later with Silence that Martin has matured greatly as a filmmaker and a storyteller. This movie, however, feels more like a bigger step for Scorsese and company as well as a much more adventurous and unproven with Scorsese continuously pulling the viewer's leg with how phony the movie really is. Masterfully aided by Terrence Winters' wonderful screenplay, Martin crafts a hazy impression of hyper-reality around the movie's events, making it feel like something in a drug-fueled fog. Of course, Scorsese constantly pulls the viewer's attention to the fact that the movie they're watching is, in fact, a movie as the aspect ratio always seems to continuously alter as the film progresses as even the boundaries of the screen change from scene to scene which fits with the story that the film is trying to show us. Marketing also plays a high part in The Wolf of Wall Street such as when Belfort fills the viewer on the facts surrounding a crazy money laundering scam or when the FBI arrest Jordan while he's filming a commercial but the agents don't stop with just apprehending Belfort as they also process to directly interrupt the entire shot-on-camera scene making for easily one of finest apprehension scenes in film history. It's also one of the boldest and divisive storytelling ideas in the movie. Also effective in the story that The Wolf of Wall Street is telling is how Scorsese grants Dicaprio free rein over the movie's plot. At one point, Belfort's voice-over straightens out the movie over the color of his car, giving the viewer an awareness of Jordan's preferences in telling his own story through the narration rather than just explaining what is happening to us as the movie certain enough to let Belfort to show us his story unfolding on the screen rather than just dumping explanation dialog on us like some other movies have a tendency to do.
At its heart, The Wolf of Wall Street is in essence penned as a cavalier endeavor at self-defense by a calculating maniac as he goes through various stages of decadence and self-indulgence as well as having to deal with the government breathing down his neck at every turn. Unlike directors like Paul Feig or Michael Bay who often insult the viewer's intelligence, Martin Scorsese trusts us enough to allow us to use our brains in order to realize that Jordan can't be trusted which might seem like a massive jump for a movie director of Scorsese's caliber but taking into account the movie has generated debates about how it portrays Belfort much like how Pulp Faction has kindled similar disputes, it would seem that Martin has misjudged filmgoers and, yet the movie never once makes any sort of sympathy pea for Jordan or even paste a convenient moralistic accusation over the end credits as it simply isn't essential for what the film is showing us. Any person watching the movie who can't even use their brain to figure out how disgraceful Jordan is, regardless of his efforts to justify his behavior, would have to be very improbable to be convinced by a corny afterthought or a condescending honest condemnation. The film is continuously harsh in its judgment of Jordan, so much so that the FBI agent that is questioning him seems to find Belfort notably repulsive due to there being no justification for his extreme excess as Jordan wasn't born into this lifestyle but rather chose to live it which in turn makes the story all the more complex and compelling.
Given how the film is adapted from the book by the same name, The Wolf of Wall Street gives Jordan the freedom to create his own protection. During a pep talk scene, Belfort discusses to his employees how he gave a struggling single mother money to help her family and while the movie counts on the viewer to consider that this is a self-directed act of generosity as a counteract against his sexist demeanor over the course of the film. Jordan's firmness that he will do anything to ensure his families' safety is counterbalanced by disregard and irresponsibility and his esteem for allegiance is