Jordan Belfort is an asshole: a straight up, full-on, coke-snorting, money-swindling, wife-cheating asshole. As played by Leonardo DiCaprio, he is the anti-hero of Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” and he is also a real person: a Bronx-born ex-stockbroker and fraudster, Belfort swindled his way into millions of dollars on the Wall Street market in the 1990s, all the while cheating on his wife with a seemingly unlimited supply of prostitutes and snorting anything and everything he could fit inside his nasal cavities. The film is based on his self-aggrandising memoir, and Scorsese has come under fire for depicting Belfort’s deplorable assholery with nary a judgemental eye; apparently showing Belfort being an asshole isn’t enough, Belfort must be punished as well, as narrative formula dictates. In reality, Belfort never truly was punished — though he was nabbed by the FBI, his 22 month sentence was spent in a minimum security prison where he was made very comfortable — and this I believe was Scorsese’s point: this asshole and his associates got away practically scot free, and ain’t that just infuriating.
An epic, darkly comic character profile which runs for three hours without ever stopping for breath, “The Wolf of Wall Street” is very much in the tradition of Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” and “Casino” and it is his best work since the latter. At 179 minutes, it’s Scorsese’s longest film and also his sweariest; wikipedia has it at a staggering 569 uses of the word “fuck,” topping “Casino”’s very admirable 422. It’s remarkable how Scorsese and his long-time editor Thelma Schoonmaker can make three hours whoosh by in what feels like half that time — though it must be said, time flies when you’re watching a man blow cocaine up a hooker’s rectum.
That, coming roughly three minutes in, is one of the countless unforgettable sights on display as Belfort, and indeed DiCaprio, dives nose-first into a cesspool teeming with drugs, money, pussy and tons upon tons of money. Did I mention the money? Belfort has so much money he has sex in a bed of banknotes. And did I mention the drugs? It’s a wonder Belfort is still alive, considering the amount of dangerous illegal substances that have made their way through his system. Crack, cocaine and something called a Quaalude: a little white pill which sends its user into a practically comatose state if they are immobile and hyper-mania if they are active. Belfort informs us that it has since been made unavailable. I can’t for the life of me imagine why.
Scorsese charts Belfort’s rise to infamous, crooked multi-millionaire from his brief stint as a junior stockbroker at a doomed Wall Street firm, where he quickly learns that the Wall Street stockbrokers don’t just say, “Pass me the phone,” they say, “Pass me the cock-sucking phone.” While there, he finds himself seduced by his chest-thumping boss (Matthew McConaughey), who advises him to live a life of debauchery if he is to be successful in the financial industry. And so he does: when the company collapses on Black Monday, Belfort starts up his own company, the respectable sounding Stratton Oakmont, with a team of ambitious, money-hungry brokers — among them Jonah Hill’s delightfully goofy crack addict Donnie Azoff — whom he teaches to manipulate stocks and cheat customers out of thousands of dollars over the phone. Those that succeed are rewarded with crazy parties, the finest of strippers and in-office midget-tossing shows. Those that don’t get their goldfish eaten by Donnie.
Soon enough, Stratton Oakmont begins to resemble a modern-day Roman empire, with Belfort a shrieking, mic-swinging Caligula and the sea of stockbrokers that stand before him his worshipping crowd. You oughta see the orgies — a mile high they are. Here, Scorsese must walk a fine line between glorifying and condoning, showing Belfort’s lifestyle of excess for the unending fun it undoubtedly was yet tut-tutting its morals (or lack thereof). In fact, there’s not much tut-tutting going on, and for good reason: we’re in Belfort’s head, listening to Belfort’s smug narration and among Belfort’s friends, thus Belfort’s wild partying is nothing but exhilarating and hilarious in its madness. The tut-tutting must come from us; Scorsese steps back and allows us to be the judge. No judge ever got to properly punish him in court — maybe our judgement is his comeuppance.
As Belfort, DiCaprio is absolutely in command, deliciously manic and equal counts loathsome and roguishly lovable. It’s his best performance to date. It also turns out he’s an unprecedented master of physical comedy — a moment in which he, having a delayed reaction to an overdose of Quaaludes and sent into what he calls the “cerebral palsy phase,” drags himself across a country club car park to his car is positively Chaplin-esque in its slapstick delivery. This scene, along with the scene that follows in Belfort’s swanky home where a drugged-up Donnie chokes on some ham, is like Scorsese doing “Dumb and Dumber” and it had me in hysterics.
Eventually, “The Wolf of Wall Street” achieves a sort of fever-dream madness where we can no longer tell if what we’re watching is real, a Quaalude-induced hallucination or a figment of Belfort’s self-aggrandising imagination — did he really watch a rescue plane burst into a fireball when a seagull flew into the engine? Whatever the case, this is magnificently entertaining: a gloriously fucked up ride through the mind and experiences of a lowlife living the high life that’s riveting in the most intoxicating of ways. Jordan Belfort is an asshole, unpunished and proud, but that doesn’t mean I can’t have a blast watching him be one.
Rating: 10/10
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