In 1929 the New York Times's "motion picture critic" Mordaunt Hall opined: "The Wolf of Wall Street is a talking feature that causes one to sigh… This yarn is not materially different from other Wall Street tales that have come to the screen. Money there is, also madness, women and swindling... Such a state of affairs. Oh dear, O, dear!"
There's no direct connection between Rowland V Lee's black-and-white drama and Martin Scorsese's black comedy (a very broad term) with which it shares its name. Yet watching the familiar elements (money, madness, women, swindling etc) I felt a certain empathy with Hall's sniffy reaction to the movie he saw "decorating the Rialto screen" all those years ago. Based on the self-aggrandising memoirs of convicted stock market trader Jordan Belfort, this three-hour orgy of greed, indulgence and swearing (more than 500 "fucks" – a screen record for a drama) follows its antihero's over-powdered nose as he snorts his way from small-town fraudster to big-time crook. En route, he sets up the notorious Stratton Oakmont brokerage firm (the inspiration for the 2000 film Boiler Room), organises dwarf-throwing parties (the real-life Belfort denies that little people were ever thrown), consumes his own body weight in Quaaludes, blows coke up a hooker's butt and has a candle shoved up his own by someone called Venice. All this debauchery we view from the smugly narrated POV of the "self-made man" himself, while the victims of his "pump and dump" schemes, many of them ordinary working-class folk ("postmen, always postmen"), remain as absent from the screen as they were from Belfort's venal mind.
Since opening to mixed reactions in the US (one cinema refused refunds to outraged patrons on the grounds that "Mr Scorsese is an auteur and his work is rated brilliant by critics and academic bastions of thought"), this exhausting movie has been charged with revelling in, rather than explicitly judging, the obscene lifestyle it depicts. Certainly, Belfort himself appears thrilled to have been portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio, who beat Brad Pitt to the lucrative book rights several years ago, rights from which Belfort insists: "I am not making a single dime." Hmm. Yet having now seen the film twice, I can attest that it made me not love but utterly loathe Belfort – a moral victory, perhaps, but also something of a problem, because a character who is simply detestable rapidly becomes uninteresting.
While The Wolf of Wall Street slavishly apes the style and structure of Goodfellas, the dramatic magnetism that made Ray Liotta's Henry Hill so watchable is sorely absent. This is not a criticism of DiCaprio, whose full-throttle performance is both tightly nuanced and insanely OTT. Rather, it's a problem with the subject, whose reptilian repugnance and vacuum-sealed amorality Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter fail to crack. For all his motivational Gordon Gekko speeches and beamingly boisterous bonhomie, Belfort remains as impenetrably alienating as the human impersonator at the heart of Cronenberg's ice-cold Cosmopolis, a studiedly austere arthouse endeavour that was at least intentionally boring – sort of. As for The Wolf of Wall Street, you wind up realising that there's a very good reason why no classic movie ever opened with the words: "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a stockbroker… "
It doesn't help that the bacchanalian scenes are conjured in tones that recall the naffest interludes of Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. For all its avowed "adult" aesthetic, there's something leeringly adolescent about the endless displays of pulchritudinous flesh, the orgies in particular looking like outtakes from some over-glossed 90s erotic thriller with auteurist affectations. Depressing, too, that while endless full-frontal nudity is required of the women, the only penis on display is fleeting, flaccid and comically fake.
Belfort may be a chauvinist ass, but that's no reason for Scorsese to follow suit. With a couple of notable exceptions, the women here are all wives, girlfriends and sex-workers. In one momentarily moving third-act speech, Belfort tells us that fellow financier Kimmie Belzer was "one of the first brokers here, one of Stratton's original 20". It's a revealing moment, so how come we've barely glimpsed her until now? Another female co-worker only gets a look in when getting her head shaved at an office party, like some latter-day witch. Meanwhile, as the second Mrs Belfort, Margot Robbie sinks her teeth into a role that is more Sharon Stone than Lorraine Bracco, while Joanna Lumley makes the most of a somewhat thankless cameo as Belfort's British aunt-in-law, holding her own amid a lazily comic montage of Big Ben, double-decker buses and picturesque London parks.
On a technical level – and with characters as unlovable as these, technicalities are everything – the film is as slick as its subject's sales patter, with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto shooting on a hybrid of film and digital, shifting the depth and clarity of his lenses to match the focus and/or confusion of the character. Editor Thelma Schoonmaker has done a first-rate job helping a struggling Scorsese get the running time down to just under three hours, but I still found myself guiltily longing for Harvey "Scissorhands" Weinstein to burst in and commit some Gangs of New York-style butchery, leaving at least another 20 minutes bleeding on the floor.
None of which is to say that The Wolf of Wall Street does not have its pleasures, notably Jonah Hill in versatile post-Moneyball form as Belfort's slimy sidekick Donnie Azoff, and a thin-faced, big-haired Matthew McConaughey teaching his protege about the financial importance of masturbation. But by the time the real Belfort gets a final-reel cameo, introducing his alter ego on stage as the now-reborn "world's greatest sales trainer!", you can't help but wish that Joe Pesci had been on hand to ask them all if they thought he was funny.
Now that would be amusing.
