The Wolf of Wall Street

2013 | Martin Scorsese

By Mark Tapio Kines

There are lots of reasons why I should not have liked The Wolf of Wall Street: It’s three hours long. As it’s an anecdote-heavy memoir of debauched Wall Street swindler Jordan Belfort that plays over the course of ten years, there’s no strong dramatic storyline. It’s filled with lengthy scenes of actors screwing around, yelling a lot and often pretending to be on drugs. And, of course, you have the occasionally obnoxious movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill.

But I enjoyed it. I enjoyed The Wolf of Wall Street.

Perhaps it’s because, at 71, Martin Scorsese can still crank out a motion picture so full of youthful energy (his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who just turned 74, deserves a lot of credit as well.) This film, with its freewheeling voice-over and surprise jumps back and forth in time, dances circles around the Scorsese-aping American Hustle. Perhaps it’s because DiCaprio is well-cast as the unrepentant, exhausting, yet strangely charming Belfort. Perhaps it’s because The Wolf of Wall Street does such a great job at capturing the look and feel of a certain era, from 1987 to 1997.

Or perhaps it’s simply because the movie is fun. It’s kind of a sick delight to look at so much excess and hedonism. Belfort and his friends look like they’re having a wonderful time, and you actually come to envy these bastards. Which may be the whole goal of the film.

With a story like this, you await the inevitable comeuppance of Belfort, but Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter seem to have made the purposeful decision to make this crook kind of likeable. Sure, he’s a liar, a drug addict, a terrible husband, and frankly a terrible human being. But throughout the movie, he is presented as, above all, a loyal friend. Which is surely an important distinction for Scorsese, who is famed for his own loyalty to his various long-time collaborators. As long as you’ve got loyalty, why repent for any other indiscretions?

For some viewers, this will be a turn-off: here you have a bunch of multimillionaires making a movie about a multimillionaire, and they all appear to agree that there’s no such thing as too much money. But is this worse than those Hollywood movies in which filthy rich filmmakers scold and punish their characters for being greedy? Call them what you will, but at least Scorsese et al aren’t being hypocrites.

In fact – and I’m giving nothing away – the film’s message becomes clear in its closing moments, specifically in its final shot: Jordan Belfort may be a scumbag, but he’s right about one thing: money is, and always will be, all-powerful. And everybody – everybody – wants more of it.

Mark Tapio Kines is a film director, writer, producer and owner of Cassava Films. You can reach Mark here.