How much is that doggy..?

Rating: 5/10 (19 January 2014)

Martin Scorsese's latest retains all of the energy that is his signature, but fails to fill its overgenerous duration with enough substantial content. The emptiness and lack of ethical backbone holding up U.S. capitalism in the eighties is explained in the first fifteen minutes, with Matthew McConaughey's Mark Hanna telling us it's nothing but "fairy dust" - empty promises - to the unknowing customer, but hard cash to the stockbroker. Half an hour in, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a multimillionaire... and we're only a sixth of the way through the movie.
The rest is an uneasy mix of gross-out and slapstick humour and bellowing domestic drama. In Goodfellas, we cared when Henry's and Karen's marriage was collapsing because we empathised - we'd seen Henry's rise from brutalised child, to errand boy, to made man. Belfort starts as a self-confessed greedy misogynist, and then we watch him swell his turgid aspiration, with all the coke and hookers this entails. Belfort isn't a million miles from DiCaprio's Gatsby - except there's no tragedy here. He's repellent from start to finish, with barely a mote of humanity for us to cling to. Unfortunately, in terms of character and theme, this greaseball and his greed are all the movie gives us. Terence Winter's script is full of incidents, most of which are drawn out and light on significance, and only occasionally funny.
DiCaprio is brilliantly broad yet nuanced as Belfort. Jonah Hill is amusing as his horse-toothed sidekick, Donnie. Scorsese's style is in abundance, the camera rarely still, like a living creature snuffling in the muck. But Thelma Schoonmaker needed stricter instructions in the editing suite. Do we really need to see another tiresome orgy? Is the sight of DiCaprio crawling into a Lamborghini really funny enough to consume five minutes of screen time? It would be okay if there was some profound moral conclusion awaiting us at the end, but what we actually get (or appear to get) is the cheeky verification of Belfort's assertion that deep down we all wanna be richer, right now. If it's Winter's and Scorsese's intention to make me feel indignant at this, and make me hate investment bankers more, then fine. But it's a tough watch for such an easy target.