K-SCORE: 71
Director: Martin Scorsese
Based on: The Wolf of Wall Street by Jordan Belfort
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie
Spoiler Level: Minor
The Wolf of Wall Street is not as amazing as its praise had me believe it would be. Leonardo DiCaprio is fantastic, extremely entertaining, and the primary reason the film is enjoyable. Despite his masterful performance, the film’s quality wanes. It's either an hour too long or has a narrative arc problem. If they wanted to simply display the progressing extremes of lifestyle for people swimming in cash, then it's the former, and if they wanted to tell the complete story of Jordan Belfort than it's the latter.
“develops from lobster throwing to yacht ruining”
The story of Wall Street tycoon Jordan Belfort spends ninety percent of the screen time giving examples of the outrageous excess, drug addiction, and sex frenzy omnipresent in his life and the lives of his colleagues. Many of these scenes are funny in a sick kind of way, but they make their point after two or three of them. The cost of this focus is we don’t see Jordan develop from young guy who just wants to be rich to visionary to leader to criminal to dangerous addict to a man who gains some understanding of the perils of his habits. Instead it develops from lobster throwing to yacht ruining. The film is even kind of just assuming that he’s a white collar criminal, but doesn’t delve into the specifics of his crimes at all. Someone laboring under delusions of a ‘fixed pot’ economic theory might have made those assumptions, but I didn’t. What did he do exactly? I know from outside research that he is guilty of such crimes, but not from the story Scorsese told.
Which also makes The Wolf of Wall Street tonally odd. Was it condemning these behaviors at all or encouraging them or neither? Still, it’s entertaining most of the time, and with a little outside help, you can extract a lot from this unique man and immoderate subculture of the American Wall Street elite.