Take Ludes Before Watching.

Rating: 7/10 (28 June 2015)

Margot Robbie plays the Brooklyn-bred wife of Wall Street scoundrel Leonard DeCaprio. Margot Robbie is also the picture of pulchritudinous perfection. Wow. How is it that Australia, a continent-sized desert island, keeps fielding these toothsome beauties? Cate Blanchett, Rose Byrne, Diane Cilento, Toni Colette, Judy Davis, Isla Fisher, Nicole Kidman, Radha Mitchell, Olivia Newton-John, Greta Scacchi, Mia Wasikowska, Naomi Watts, Peta Wilson, and the ever-popular Mae Busch. What is it, something in the water? Something to do with dream time? There are some things man was never meant to know.
As the real life bastard, Jordan Belfort, DeCaprio gives an exceptionally good performance. Belfort has one outstanding talent that, like musical genius, will never show up on a standard intelligence test. He's a charismatic salesman. He can sell you anything. He's smooth and energetic, and he does a lot of dope to keep him that way.
His entire life is based on a single premise, stated thus by Mr. Micawber in "David Copperfield." "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery."
Money in his world seems to buy happiness, just as it seems to in real life. Would he have any hope of marrying someone who looked like Margot Robbie if he'd been a poor but honest gas station attendant? In your dreams. When he loses his dough and has to sell the house, she leaves him abruptly, dispassionately, rationally, pragmatically. DeCaprio is broke? Good-bye, DeCaprio.
The acting is very good on everyone's part. The structure is familiar enough from Martin Scorcese's earlier work that it's comfortably reassuring. We kind of know what's coming. DeCaprio will make a lot of money doing illegal stuff, then lose it, and wind up maybe not much wiser but at least still breathing after he rats on his friends.
The acting and the story are nearly flawless, yet the movie doesn't entirely click, and the cause is the direction. It's as if everyone's battery, including Scorsese's, had been overcharged and sparks were flying everywhere. There's virtually no violence but its absence is made up for by noise, lots of noise, lots of long arguments in which all parties scream at one another. Insane ebullience. No office of stock salesmen has ever been run like DeCaprio's -- people screaming and running around, snorting coke and dropping Ludes, and multiple couples banging away doggy style on the desk tops. The booze flows like Niagara. Erg for erg, joule for joule, decibel for decibel, I don't think this movie has ever been beaten.
The dialog is very uneven. DeCaprio's narration is okay. It's a familiar device. But then a snippet of Robbie's voice over takes place, never to be heard again. Tha't clumsy editing. We don't learn too much that we don't already know when DeCaprio gives his evangelical speeches.
Maybe the best conversational exchange is a very quiet and intimate one between DeCaprio and an FBI agent who is making what they call a "threshold interview." Both DeCaprio and the agent, Kyle Chandler, are phenomenal, their expressions and inflections unforgettable, as DeCaprio -- oh, so cleverly, so oleaginously -- offers Chandler a bribe without ever saying so. It's a simple scene. And it's believable in a way that the office orgies are not.
I like Scorsese's work. He's one of a handful of directors, like the Coens, doing original stuff today. He needs to calm down. But "The Wolf of Wall Street" is eminently watchable. There is another memorable scene, not to be missed, when DeCaprio is strung out on some dynamite Ludes and must roll down a brick stairway and crawl to his car.