It's physical energy that comes through strongest when watching DiCaprio's performance in The Wolf of Wall Street, Scorsese's 2013 film that documents the rise and rise of Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio). Belfort was a cocaine-addicted rouge trader on Wall Street during the late 80s / early 90s who made his fortunes by miss-selling mostly worthless stocks to small-time investors. At 3 hours of run-time, I had shied away from seeing it for some time. The film's themes of the American Dream, capitalism going wrong (or working as intended - you decide) and toxic masculinity are as relevant today as ever. DiCaprio plays Belfort as a wild-eyed prophet of greed-is-good hyper capitalism, full of energy, anger and drive to be the richest, most aggressive rule-breaker in New York.
I'm obviously going to compare with Goodfellas. Why? Well more than them both simply being films by Martin Scorsese, they're both films that focus on quintessentially American aspects of American life, and crucially the American Dream. Both document a rise from humble beginnings at the expense of others into a dubious world that promises much to youth but many older hands have found to be ultimately hollow. Both are critiquing the American Dream. Goodfellas is one of the best American films made in the last 40 years, and Wolf of Wall Street isn't. Goodfellas succeeds where Wolf fails in two areas, both in the arc of the main character and in the pacing of its final act.
Where Henry Hill eventually finds the hollowness at the heart of the dream he has been sold by his Mafia friends, Jordan Belfort never does. And while Hill's world is falling apart, the pace and editing in Goodfellas speeds up, driving home the rapidity of the fall. The long slow rise through youth quickly until Hill is left holding the morning paper describing himself as a 'shnook'. Neither of these happen in Wolf, and while it may be true that to stay true to the story of the real like Jordan Belfort, the script cannot have fall in the same way as Hill, a similar tone could have been found without anything so dramatic. An early Matthew McConaughey scene in Wolf has McConaughey embody a coked-up elder statesmen of the stock broker trade, left with nothing but vodka, money, masturbation and the adulation of Belfort. The scene appears to foreshadow Belfort's potential downward trajectory into a similar tragi-comic figure. The script writes itself.
But it doesn't happen, we end on a fall of sort for Belfort, but the assumptions underlying everything he has done are still in place. Without the fall the film's pace stays fairly static. In fact some of the longer, questionable sequences happen towards the end (Jonah Hill's choking, the entire portion dedicated to a Mediterranean cruise). It amounts to a feeling that Belfort is a lucky, smart guy who gets to write his own path, in spite of all the people he's hoodwinked out of their investments. There are no consequences for what he has done. Of course one can reasonably argue that this is a real reflection of American society, often the rich and powerful don't answer for crimes. And an audience is perfectly capable of making up its own mind on what they should think about Jordan Belfort. But tone in a film matters, and the tone of Wolf of Wall Street is one of celebration of Belfort, of what he did, and of what he stood for.
The film succeeds is in its performances and energy of editing (especially sequences involving Belfort sweeping through his offices geeing up his troops). The film doesn't work so well in the tone of its morality and choice of edit with respect to entire scenes that could have been cut. Definitely recommended though. It is Scorsese after all.
