Street Wiseguy

Rating: 8/10 (1 January 2014)

This film is recommended.
Wall Street and its "greed is good" philosophy has always been such an easy target. With its luxurious life style excesses and its wheelers and dealers always on the make, the rise and fall of one man seems only par for the course. Such is the case of Martin Scorsese's manic and fully energized film, The Wolf of Wall Street.
The film is good to a fault, the fault being an excessive amount of excessiveness, both on the screen and behind the camera lens. Clocking in at three hours, The Wolf on Wall Street starts to outstay its welcome rather quickly. The frat-boy shenanigans and high testosterone level just wears you out rather than grab your interest.
Based on the real life memoirs of Jordan Belfort, the film tracks the beginnings and the end of this trader and con artist who bilked many unsuspecting clients from their life savings. Played by Leonardo DiCaprio, we follow this amoral character and his illegal dealings whose schemes seem to be so over-the-top and outlandishly stranger than non-fiction. That becomes the film's fatal flaw as too many liberties have been taken from the actual facts that the film borders on inanity and loses all credibility as the film reaches its conclusion.
The Wolf on Wall Street takes its title character, Jordan "Wolfie" Belfort, and parades his hedonistic antics front and center. His exploits are highly exploitive and wholly inappropriate, from his dwarf throwing party and steady stream of drugs, alcohol, and sex to his fast expensive cars and even faster expensive women. He trades in one loyal wife for a sleeker and more buxomly model. He apprentices and corrupts an nebbish assistant (well played by Jonah Hill) who is more than willing to sell his soul for a price. In fact, everyone in this film has no moral compass, including Scorsese who relishes in this outrageous behavior to the point that the director appears to take a perverse glee with the numerous gratuitous shots of full frontal female nudity and orgasmic debauchery on the screen.
In the film, Scorsese treats his subjects as white collar gangsters sans the violence, familiar territory for this director. The director has his signature swooping camera-work (fine work by cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto) and flashy editing which is perfectly suited for this type of film. His journey into their orgasmic drug-induced world is still an engrossing adventure that is thrilling to experience but also disturbingly unsettling. He is a master filmmaker and his film is so well executed and a wonderful comic diversion mainly due to DiCaprio's marvelous performance.
The actor throws himself fiercely into this role and he creates a fully developed and charismatic scoundrel. He delivers his many tirades and spiels with an edgy bravado and, in one scene while high on Quaaludes, DiCaprio shows off his fine comic timing with tightly controlled slapstick movement that is quite impressive. Strong support is contributed by Rob Reiner, Matthew McConaughey, Kyle Chandler, and especially by Margot Robbie as Wolfie's trophy wife.
Still there are far too many scenes that go on and on needlessly to the point of overstatement and tedium. More judicious editing would have only improved the finished film. The screenplay by Terence Winter truly captures the avarice motives of the stockbroker's well and has wonderful dialog even though some of the character's action remain unexplained in their unbridled admiration for Jordan.
The Wolf of Wall Street is always entertaining but its excessiveness and overwrought narrative makes the film a loud and bloated exercise in expert filmmaking that never carries any emotional impact. The film huffs and puffs and eventually blows its own house down with its own pretentious ambitions. GRADE: B
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