"The Wolf of Wall Street" Smiles, But Shows No Teeth

Rating: 8/10 (4 February 2015)

"The Wolf of Wall Street" is tremendously entertaining. When watching this movie in a theater, and you resist using the bathroom even after imbibing a medium Cherry Coke, you know it is the sign of exceptional storytelling.
This movie's narrative structure is similar to "Goodfellas" (1990) and "Boogie Nights" (1997) in that the first half of the film is fun to watch as you witness the rise of the antihero protagonist and the supporting players. Especially if you greatly dislike the protagonist and resent his rise to power, if the second half is hard to watch, you know you are seeing something good.
However, although the story arc is similar, it's not quite as great as the aforementioned films. Granted you witness great acting from almost everyone involved, and eye-opening moments.
Unfortunately, the movie never got past the excesses and to the true consequences of the protagonist's actions. Even then, the movie seemed to be mostly preoccupied with the high lives these stock-brokers were living, and virtually ignored the lives they ruined on their way to the top.
Leonardo DiCaprio is Jordan Belfort, an ambitious man who takes a job as a stockbroker on Wall Street. Unfortunately, despite having a dynamic mentor (played by a superb, scene-stealing Matthew McConaughey), it is 1987, and the stock market takes a plunge that puts him of work.
Soon afterwords, he takes a modest job in a boiler room selling penny stocks. It turns out that Belfort is not just good at selling these worthless intangibles: he's great at it.
Eventually, he starts his own company with shady children's furniture salesman Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) and other compatriots from the boiler room, where they employ the pump and dump scam to their advantage. When they amass enough money, they begin to give their firm a respectable name, Stratton Oakmont, and make money hand over fist using the same marauding techniques, only on a larger scale.
I'll be the first to admit that stock trading and the tribulations of Wall Street are very foreign to me. If I see a movie like "Wall Street", I don't know what the numbers scrolling across the NYSE mean. I could only rely on the faces of Michael Douglass or Charlie Sheen to know if the overall news was good or not.
To the film's credit, I could understand how Stratton Oakmont amassed their wealth. I can also understand the illegality of their trade, and I'm certain that most audience members with no Wall Street familiarity will not be lost.
Even if one hates these people for their avarice, and the immoral and reprehensible lives that they lead as a result of their accumulated fortune, one cannot deny how entertaining it is to watch these shenanigans. Their charades may not be appealing, especially when the Securities and Exchange Commission begins to take note of their activities, but they are still engrossing.
However, the party lasts a little too long at a running time of 180 minutes. This movie could have easily been cut back 40 minutes by taking out a party scene or two. Another scene where Belfort meets with corrupt Swiss banker Jean-Jacques Saurel (Jean Dujardin) could also have been shortened significantly.
Plus, with these people living so high off their riches, it is impossible to believe that no one got hurt financially in the process. Belfort lived the high life (both figuratively because of his wealth, and literally because of his excessive drug use), but there had to have been lives that were ruined because of his schemes.
Still, as far as acting goes, DiCaprio himself owns this film, and it definitely is among his best performances. His breaking the fourth wall is done enough so that it is not redundant, and his motivational speeches to his firm members are incredibly over-the-top, but appropriately so given his character.
Jonah Hill was decent as Belfort's right hand man, although his performance sometimes became a little too comically inappropriate, as if he was playing the fat guy who falls on his face the same way he has done in lesser comedies (excluding "Superbad" (2007) and "21 Jump Street"). However, the scene where he nearly chokes to death when high on Quaalude was scary for me to watch.
That same scene, where Belfort is also dramatically debilitated from the same kind of Quaalude, received some laughs from the audience in my theater, but I didn't find the scene funny at all. It was one of the most memorable drug scenes I've seen in a mainstream movie, but like Uma Thurman's heroin overdose moment in "Pulp Fiction" (1994), and Julianne Moore's hyper, heartbreaking, high-on-cocaine "too many things" scene in "Boogie Nights" (1997), it made me never want to try drugs.
On top of stand-out performances by Margot Robbie as Belfort's trophy wife, Rob Reiner as Belfort's profane and no-nonsense father, and McConaughey's brief but memorable role, the ensemble cast succeeded for the most part in making greed look ugly. When the firm hits their chests and chant an innocuous but catchy quasi-tribal tune, they make true fools out of themselves, but are too busy conforming to care.
While "The Wolf of Wall Street" is a memorable movie, it doesn't quite reach the emotional depths of director Martin Scorsese's previous movies like "Raging Bull" or "Goodfellas". In the latter film, when Henry Hill's life takes a turn for the worst, you can feel him crash and burn.
Here, Jordan Belfort eventually falls, but appears to hit a bed of roses. He story ends with consequences, but he just ends up not as wealthy as he used to be.
This movie leaves with the implication that Belfort lived his high life so well that the tab he had to pay wasn't all that steep. Somebody had to pay the rest of that bill, and probably did, but you wouldn't know it from seeing it here.