Three hours of Scorsese on amphetamines. The most divisive film of his late career, and a satire that audiences kept mistaking for celebration.
Jordan Belfort takes a junior position at a Wall Street firm in 1987 on the morning of Black Monday. He's laid off the same week. He takes a job at a Long Island boiler room selling penny stocks, discovers he's gifted at it, and within months founds his own firm — Stratton Oakmont — which becomes a multi-billion-dollar pump-and-dump operation through the 1990s.
The film follows Belfort's rise and fall across three hours: the money, the second wife, the helicopter, the yacht, the Quaaludes addiction, the FBI investigation, and the eventual short federal sentence in a tennis-court prison. The film is Belfort's own narration — directly to camera at times — and refuses to apologise for its identification with him.
The Wolf of Wall Street has been controversial since its 2013 release for one reason: Scorsese refuses the third-act moral framing that Hollywood biographical films usually deliver. There is no scene of Belfort genuinely realising the harm he's caused. The film closes on Belfort, post-prison, selling sales seminars to a New Zealand audience, with the camera lingering on the audience's faces. They want what he's selling.
Scorsese has argued, repeatedly, that the film is a satire, and that audiences who walk away energised by Belfort have themselves missed the point. The film's defence is that satire works through identification — that letting the audience feel the seductive pull of Belfort's life is what allows the closing shot to land. The critique is that, in practice, Wall Street recruiters have used clips from the film to attract junior traders for over a decade.
The film's most-quoted sequence is Belfort, having taken aged Lemmon 714 Quaaludes that hit him an hour later than expected, attempting to drive home in his white Lamborghini. The scene runs roughly five minutes. DiCaprio plays it as physical comedy — Belfort drags himself across the country-club floor, falls down stairs, attempts to use a rotary payphone.
DiCaprio reportedly studied Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin to prepare. The performance is, technically, a remarkable piece of silent-film-grade physical acting. The narrative purpose of the scene is to demonstrate that Belfort's drug consumption was so extreme that he was lucky to be alive — and that he attempted, while incapacitated, to assault his wife. The film delivers the comic energy of the sequence and lets the implications land in the next scene.
Margot Robbie was 22 when she was cast as Belfort's second wife Naomi; The Wolf of Wall Street was her first major film. The performance launched a career that would lead to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Barbie.
The film has been criticised, fairly, for the way Belfort's view of women is presented without much counter-framing. Scorsese's argument is that the film's perspective is Belfort's, and Belfort's perspective on women is part of the indictment. The counter-argument is that the film's pleasure in its excesses does not always clearly distinguish itself from its protagonist's pleasure. Both readings are textually defensible.