WORDS Eoin McCague
Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, his fifth and most dynamic collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio, has not arrived at the multiplexes with a whimper. Boasting a record-setting 569 usages of “fuck”, multiple orgies and enough drugs to “sedate Manhattan” the film was banned in Malaysia, Nepal and Kenya with 45 minutes cut from screenings in the UAE. Thankfully, Irish viewers will have the chance to experience all 179 uncut minutes of debauchery that easily ranks as Scorsese’s best film since Casino.
DiCaprio plays Jordan Belfort, who in the 90s founded a “boiler room” brokerage firm designed to lure in the wealthiest 1% of Americans under the auspices of an impressive name — Stratton Oakmont. Through a series of “pump and dump” schemes, Belfort and his band of merry men (including career-best performances from Jonah Hill and Jon Bernthal) steal from the rich, and spend the money in style. Perhaps wisely, Scorsese doesn’t exhibit the effect of Belfort’s swindles on his victims; instead his Wolf is a pitch-black comedy about the seedy underbelly of capitalism with a hidden moral centre that has outraged conservatives in America. God help us, we’ve been conditioned for the longest time to believe that characters should be sympathetic and stories should find their conclusion using a moral compass. It is positively refreshing then that Scorsese, 71, portrays the frenzy with all the sort of coke-snorting energy, detailed depravity and manic camera movements we’d associate with a man half his age, while never once spoonfeeding the audience.
DiCaprio throws himself completely into the role. In one astonishing set piece, completely floored by a massive overdose of Belfort’s drug of choice (Quaaludes), he crawls his way out of a country club, into his car and drives a mile down the road, all in order to stop Hill’s character speaking on a tapped phone. It is a classic piece of physical comedy that would make Jim Carrey and Jean Dujardin (here playing a slippery French-Swiss banker) sit up and take note.
Despite the confident performances, kinetic editing and assured directing, the film feels frantically long at three hours. Pushed back from its November slot to Christmas Day in the States in order to be eligible for the Oscars, Wolf carries the whiff of a hurried product. Boredom is never an option when a master like Scorsese is the best he’s been in 20 years, and yet scenes often tick on a beat too long. We are left with bloated sequences of depravity that serve character, but in no way plot. Conducted with a confidence unseen since Goodfellas, Wolf inevitably imitates too many of that masterpiece’s techniques, and while it is not necessarily a bad thing, the film at times leaves us watching Scorsese ripping off Scorsese.
