Great in many ways, but a bit interminable... and could backfire

Rating: 6/10 (8 March 2014)

The Wolf of Wall Street is a fantastic showcase. It showcases all the artists who create and inhabit the world depicted, including the tech (set/prop/etc.) folks.
The writing/direction is good. Expressionistic/over-the-top, fun; effective at what it does.
The only problem I had was that the flick seemed to be a kind of "The Hangover"-with-money. In other words, it's this interminable expose of a hollow man; and that's not enough to take the film to the next level. You are treated to this cavalcade wild ride of big money adrenalin and bizarre drug abuse, and wind up sort of lost in that kaleidoscopic maze... for a long, long time. Then the film ends. It was a great vehicle for all the people involved, and I enjoyed it, as such. But bear in mind that, in the end, it's a kind of hollow snack.
How is it hollow? Let's think about the moral dimension for a bit. It seems like Scorsese is trying to lay bare the amorality (at best; immorality at worst) of high finance. But doesn't this flick really just wind up scapegoating an over-the-top talisman of Wall St. excess? Aren't we supposed to chase the Wolf over the cliff, and then feel cleansed of sin? No: That wouldn't work; not with folks who think about the hard implications of Mammon worship. Which means, actually, that I'm wrong: "The Wolf of Wall Street" would work just dandy, at a deep, subconscious level, with altogether too many people. And that is an unfortunate key effect Scorsese's approach to this story that actually bothers me.
I like to think of Scorsese as a complex, challenging voice of moral conscience; but he seemed to have sort of lost his way with this flick. I think its effect is a perverse inverse of what a "voice of social moral conscience" would intend. I think, for all the out-of-it, abusive, egregious affronts to decency, that the downstream effect is an apologetic for those affronts.
I often think of one of my fave, direct, cinematic expressions of this kind of moral inoculation: THX 1138. There's a scene where one of the denizens of that underworld are flipping around the TV, and encounters a 24/7 channel which shows robocops beating up citizens. The idea is that, after being exposed to so much overt abuse, you speedily go through your cycle (rage, bewilderment, internalization) and then can get on with your passive role as a cog in a system. That's how I feel about the depiction of excess in "Wolf". Sadly, I think Scorsese missed the boat: We're already inoculated. Wall Street has long, long, long been disassociated from human value, and we have long, long internalized that disassociation as "business-as-usual". Do they really need Scorsese's help?