Meaningless catalogue of grotesques

Rating: 5/10 (3 February 2014)

I have seen thousands of films in my life, but I cannot remember one in which every single character was a disgusting example of the worst elements of humanity. At last I have found one. Is this the 'truth' about Wall Street? I have no idea, but it corresponds almost exactly with my own beliefs. So I should like it? Right? It panders to my prejudices. It tells 'the truth'.
Oh, no. That is not what makes for great cinema. Great cinema surprises you, it opens new vistas, it invites one to question things that had been assumed.
All of Scorsese's films - even since 'The Big Shave' - have featured characters who exhibit aspects of masochism, or self-destruction. In 'The Wolf of Wall Street' it is moral masochism writ large that is on display. That is not necessarily a problem, but this is a film without a moral compass. If it could be reasonably described as a 'cautionary tale', it might have some merit. But it isn't, because the film is seen through the eyes of a human cockroach.
Scorsese knows the cinema well. He knows that the audience will identify with, and try to rationalise the actions of, the character who is on- screen for the most of the time. Thus it has been since the cinema began. And, without a shadow of a doubt, an enormous number of people whose own personal avarice is well advanced, will see the film and rationalise it as a series of errors of judgement by the eponymous Jordan Belfort.
Of course, there are some positives - the visual catch-line to Jordan's miraculously fortunate drive while stoned with his drugs raises a laugh, and certain ironies emerge in the final quarter of the film, but it is Jordan's story and it is clear that he thinks he was justified and just made mistakes (viz the final scene).
If it were possible to get all of the right-wing finance ministers from around the world and lock them in a cinema that showed this non-stop for a few weeks, it might just change their mind about the thrust of economic policy that encourages unbridled avarice, but that is a vain hope.
In the end we see Jordan all set to make the same mistakes in another territory. He evidently hadn't learnt a thing. And what is a thousand times worse is that he had evidently benefited financially from the film - it being based on his own book.
People who know me and my philosophical approach to cinema will probably find this review strange. In general, I detest the idea of judging the moral stance of a film. But this film doesn't, it seems to me, take a moral stance in a story that concerns itself with a subject that most blights the lives of the majority of our species - inequality, and one man's efforts to increase it. And it doesn't provide us with psychological or cinematic insight into its subject either... the film is inhabited by a bunch of grotesques that are barely human in their blind avarice.
Avarice is the most evil of the seven deadly sins, because it leads to all of the others. This is not something which emerges from either this film's form or content.