Fast, loud and morally ambiguous: the Scorcese way

Rating: 7/10 (18 April 2014)

Entertaining, fast-paced, funny and morally ambiguous -- in a lot of ways, very typical Scorcese, and as usual, it's tough to dislike despite generally despicable characters. When I first heard about this movie, I was surprised the director had chosen to take on the story, because Wall Street greed seems like one of the easiest things to hate these days, full of real-life "despicable characters" and shady behavior. That this movie was based on truth is almost beside the point: nobody likes guys like Leonardo DiCaprio's Jordan Belfort. In fact, most people hate guys like this.
Of course, Jordan Belfort is a real person, and the larger-than-life escapades of drugs, hookers, big money stock trading, and (many) more drugs make for easy eye candy in Scorsese's hands. He's done it before -- Wolf of Wall Street resembles nothing so much as the director's 1990 masterpiece Goodfellas, from the charismatic protagonist who worked his way up from nothing to obtaining huge power, the backdrop of glorified crime, the FBI investigations, the gluttonous vices, to the faithful wife who finally has enough, and the soundtrack full of classic rock, blues and punk. Some of these things are tried and true Scorcese hallmarks, while others do admittedly feel a bit retreaded.
There are two main differences between Wolf and Goodfellas: the first is that despite a breakneck pace (featuring more varieties of coke snorting and pill-popping than I actually knew existed), the film is too long. There is a lot of good (and truly funny) dialogue in the movie, but a couple of scenes simply seem to go on too long, slowing the movie down without adding much depth to the story. Wolf is three hours long, and had it been edited into a Goodfellas-esque two hours or so, it might have stood along side the earlier film as kind of a sub-masterpiece in a genre that Scorcese pretty much owns.
The other difference is that unlike Henry Hill, you never get the feeling that Jordan Belfort learned any real lesson. He eventually loses everything: his wife, his house, his company, money and friends (one of which is the monstrously and comically greedy Donnie Azoff, played by Jonah Hill) -- and at the end, though taken down a peg as far as monetary success is concerned, doesn't seem particularly emotionally different than when he started. He's a gifted (albeit slimy and terminally selfish) salesperson, and that's probably all he could ever be.
All this said, Wolf is very entertaining. There are lots of funny moments, and plenty more scenes that make your pulse race, if only out of suspense of when someone's going to have a heart attack from doing so many drugs. It does arguably glorify the lifestyle of these traders, but at the same time, it's hard to come out of it thinking you'd ever want to be a part of that world. Scorcese, perhaps better than any filmmaker in history, again demonstrates how success/failure and good/evil are nothing more than sides of a coin, and one's reaction to Jordan Belfort and the other wolves on Wall Street could very well be down to where one stands at the end of the trading day.