Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio) arrives on Wall Street as a starry-eyed 22-year old married stockbroker with a dream of helping people make money. Before long, Belfort is exposed to the real nature of Wall Street by his new boss Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey .) Hanna tells Belfort to embrace a lifestyle of drugs and prostitutes and that making your client money doesn't matter, as long as you get your commission. Hanna's company soon falls after the stock market crashes on Black Monday in 1987 and Belfort is left without a job. Left with no other options, Belfort takes a low-key job at a penny stock boiler room and realizes that he can make a lot more profit off of penny-stocks then he did working with large-scale corporate stocks. Partnering with his neighbor Donnie Azof (Jonah Hill) and a bunch of small-time pot dealers he knows from college and his neighborhood, Belfort starts up his own company in an abandoned auto-body garage. His company, Stratton Oakmont, begins to rapidly expand in pretty much no time at all and the money starts flowing in abundance. As the company starts making big money, the life of excess begins. Drugs, lavish office parties, prostitutes, etc, the workers of Stratton Oakmont are living the high life. With the amount of noise Statton Oakmont is making, people are going to start to take notice. An FBI task force led by agent Patrick Denham (Kyle Chandler) is hellbent to bring down Belfort and Stratton Oakmont's corrupt practices and end their luxurious lifestyles once and for all.
I've seen a good number of movies in my days and I can't think of another mainstream American movie that is even close to as obscene as The Wolf of Wall Street. Scorsese and writer Terrence Winter wanted to expose the no holds-barred nature of what Jordan Belfort and his cronies were doing on Wall Street and they certainly get their point across with flying colors.
I absolutely love that the filmmakers didn't hold back in showing just how awful of a person Belfort was. In the very beginning of the story, he's a honest, mild-mannered guy who just wants to help other people make money. But as soon as he starts making money himself, he becomes an animal (a wolf to be exact) who only cares about how high his personal income is and hiding that money overseas so the FBI can't take it. He made a ton of money from screwing people over on shady investments then spends that money on a boatload of drugs and hookers, all while ignoring his own family and treating them like shit when he is around. DiCaprio makes Belfort one of the most despicable, heartless pricks to grace the big screen in recent memory. DiCaprio has wanted this project to be made for years and it shows with his performance. He emphasizes just how disillusioned and rotten Belfort was and allows the viewer to show absolutely no sympathy for him once he begins his downward spiral into greed, infidelity and addiction.
The supporting cast is responsible for a majority of the comedy this films offers up. Jonah Hill makes the best of his years in comedic roles as Belfort's second-in-command Donnie Azof. While Azof certainly loves his drugs and certainly has similar motives as Belfort, you never hate him as much as Belfort and that can be attributed Hill's likability and great comedic delivery. Adding to the comedic crew are Rob Reiner as Belfort's short-fused father known as "Mad" Max (the scene were he barges into a meeting yelling at his son about the company credit card bill is completely priceless) and Jon Bernthal as Brad Bodnick, one of the many pot dealers Belfort employs. Bernthal makes Bodnick stand out from the rest of the drug dealers in the film because he looks the part and delivers some of the best wise-ass dialogue in a film that's full of wise-ass dialogue. Hill, Reiner, and Bernthal are all great, but they don't hold a candle to the lights-out performance by McConaughey. McConaughey's role is basically an extended cameo at the beginning of the film, but he tears up the screen with a demented energy that he hasn't shown since Dazed and Confused. I was legitimately bummed out that his character was out of the story so fast, he gives the craziest performance in a film that is packed to brim with colorful, mentally-unstable characters.
Where The Wolf Of Wall Street's biggest strength is in it's no holds-barred portrayal of the Starraton Oakmont crew's life of excess, it's also where the film falters the most. It just gets really repetitive when your into the second hour of the film and you've been watching Belfort and his cohorts snort various drugs and bang hookers every 10-15 minutes. The point has been made by then: Belfort and the people that worked for him were reckless. They cheated on their wives with prostitutes, didn't care about anything but themselves and their money and spent their exorbitant amount of money earned from scamming people on illegal things. You don't need 20-25 reminders over the course of the film that's what these guys were doing. Because of this repetition, the film ends up being far too long. The film runs 180 minutes and could've easily been cut down to at least 150 minutes. There's quite a few scenes, especially in the second half, that do absolutely nothing to advance the plot and are pretty much just an excuse to show more nudity and drug use. The film definitely has moments of brilliance with some striking monologues, performances and truly hysterical scenes that perfectly accentuate just how awful of a person Jordan Belfort was, but at three hours long it's ultimately too tedious of an exercise in excess to be a masterpiece and/or one of Scorsese's best films.
4/5 Stars
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