Great and Important Movie

Rating: 10/10 (2 March 2014)

In Wolf of Wall Street Scorsese has made a masterfully engaging and entertaining film (we laugh at its characters, not with them); it's also moving in surprising ways. It delivers the blaring wake-up call a drunk hears when cops stop his loopy drive down Sunset Boulevard. Is it great? Seems so to me. It certainly is terrific.
Wolf is about excess - the real excess of the real world of Wall Street high finance and of the perverse American dream its siren call draws us to. Those who walk away offended (ask who isn't) should direct their anger at "the masters of the universe" ... the real people the movie portrays  along with the people we see in the mirror each morning as we prepare to march along feeding the dream. Do we condemn Bosch for painting his nightmares because they lure us into the pits of hell?
Denying Wall Street's reality is like believing that steroids didn't propel baseball's batting surge -- and all the complicit claims of ignorance up to the top of MLB's food chain. Filming Wolf from a moral high ground to judge its characters would be a comparable denial; it would surrender to the culture of High Finance by buying into the fantasy that we need a big daddy to wag fingers at the perps and change the bad boys' minds.
Wolf simply announces: this is the real Wall Street -- if you want change, be that change ... yourself.
DiCaprio is powerful and persuasive; McConaughey haunts the movie throughout in a tiny role; Hill is excellent, and Margot Robbie is perfect.