Good, but morally queasy

Rating: 8/10 (24 January 2014)

Jordan Belfort can do two things extremely well: sell, and teach others to sell. Setting up his own stock brokerage, he proceeds to make vast amounts of money, which he then takes immense pleasure in spending on property, cars, trophy wife, sex and drugs. Lots of drugs. However, the facts that he is not concerned about the morality or legality of how he makes his money attracts the attention of the FBI. First of all, this is a film not to see if you object to nudity, sex, drug use or bad language on screen, because there is a great deal of all these things in this film. Seriously, if this stuff upsets you, stay away.
Martin Scorsese's film, fictionalised from Belfort's book, makes no moral judgment as to Belfort's activities: indeed, it goes out of its way to make him (as portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio) engaging and likable. Indeed, given that much of the activity here is either callously disregarding of others (much of the money made is at the expense of unseen people who can ill afford it), or dissolute hedonism, it is surprising that the film is often very, very funny (there is a particularly funny sequence showing that DiCaprio has a previously unsuspected gift for physical comedy). The last half hour or so becomes more serious.
There are some terrific performances here, and Scorsese's direction is stunning. At 3 hours it is overlong, and there are two sequences where Belfort delivers speeches to his assembled sales team which outstay their welcome, not to mention the fishbowl scene which has little point. But I remained interested and entertained throughout the film's length, notwithstanding some grave reservations about the lessons being illustrated.