The Wolf of Wall Street

Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street is almost certain to divide audiences this holiday season.  I personally saw it as a darkly comical story of greed and corruption.  And yet, the film is so blatant and unwavering in its depiction of graphic sex, drug use, and just flat out hedonistic behavior, I can understand why the movie would turn some viewers off.  If anything, this movie proves that it's next to impossible for a high-profile project like this to get an NC-17 rating, as it frequently pushes the limits the R-rating it received.

This is a movie that pulls no punches, and is all the better for it.  Even with a running time of three hours, this is a highly energized and completely entertaining film that would seem too bizarre to be true at times, if we didn't already know that some of the stuff depicted on screen actually happened.  We know this, because the film is based on the personal memoir of Jordan Belfort, a guy who became an overnight success story in his 20s mostly through illegal stock trading, and was arrested for fraud and money laundering.  Leonardo DiCaprio (in his fifth film with Scorsese) portrays Jordan as an ambitious young man who starts his career on Wall Street on October 19th, 1987, otherwise known as Black Monday - the date of the biggest market crash since the Depression era.  Desperate for any kind of real work, he takes a small job dealing in penny stocks, where he trades in the business of semi-worthless companies for a huge commission.

Building on his success dealing essentially with junk stocks, Jordan decides to expand and start his own Wall Street firm, largely dealing with illegal operations, and big commissions on mostly worthless stocks.  He starts out with a small band of followers who dream of becoming rich quick, including Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill), who quits his job selling children's clothing on the spot when he sees the car that Jordan drives and learns how much money he makes, eventually becoming his right hand man in the operation.  The firm grows into a massive success story, and with that growth, comes incredible wealth, beautiful women from all walks of life, and a lifestyle build around excess and every hard drug imaginable, with Quaaludes playing an especially big part in Jordan's reason for existing on a daily basis.

The Wolf of Wall Street is a fascinating study on how Jordan divided his time between making a halfhearted attempt at being a family man in his luxurious home, and then goes to a job that frequently resembles an out of control frat party, with sex and people doing lines of coke at their desks being a regular sight.  Much like the atmosphere in these scenes, the pacing of the film itself is relentless.  The tone of the movie is reckless, wild, and frequently hilarious.  There are some moments that may not seem funny in reality, but we laugh because we can't believe what we are seeing.  One such moment would be the sequence where Jordan has to drive his car home while under the influence of powerful drugs, in an effort to stop a friend from making a phone call after he learns his phone has been tapped by the F.B.I., who have been investigating him and his shady deals.  We laugh not only because of the seemingly-implausible situation, but also from the physical humor in DiCaprio's performance as he tries to drag his heavily sedated body down a flight of stairs to his car.  The scene builds brilliantly as it mixes suspense and uncomfortable humor.

It is to the movie's credit that it makes no bones about who Jordan and the people he surrounds himself with truly are.  It doesn't try to soften him, or let us understand him, it simply throws us head-first into his world of hard living, money, and drugs.  One of the first times we see Jordan, he has arranged a contest in his office where employees toss little people at a Velcro target board for cash.  He seems to completely devalue human life and decency, and it is to DiCaprio's credit that he does not try to soften the character, while at the same time completely mesmerizing his audience so that we go along with him through the entire three hour journey the film runs.  With his combination of smooth, oily charm, plus a sort of comedic incompetence once things start to fall apart, His performance, combined with Scorsese's energized direction, are what keep us so engaged.

Watching The Wolf of Wall Street, you get the sense that Scorsese just decided to go all out.  In all fairness, this is the closest he has come to making a thrill ride movie.  It's so captivating, so fast-paced, and at times so funny, you almost forget that at its center, it is a rather tragic story of a man who loses nearly everything because of his own greed.  By taking this approach, we are not only drawn into the world of Jordan Belfort, but we almost begin to understand it and see why it appealed to him so much.  We may not be very fond of the guy, but we have to admit we've enjoyed the time we've spent with him.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

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