Martin Scorsese has played this song before and he plays it well. It’s the same tune as Goodfellas. The same tune as a lot of crime films, in fact. It’s the one where a bad guy rises and falls, while Scorsese observes the details of his world with a fierce eye. It’s the story of Jordan Belfort, a real life dirtbag (the film is based on Belfort’s own published memoirs) who gleefully defrauded honest investors of millions which he then spent on a lifestyle that was a cross between a rock star and a Roman emperor. Instead of Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci though, you get Leonardo DiCaprio, who embodies aspects of them all (his narration here often matches Liotta’s old Henry Hill cadence). And instead of a bravura sequence of paranoia and phantom helicopters, you get an amazing quaalude trip that goes wrong in several hilarious ways.
It’s entertaining as hell. Scorsese is now in his 70s and remains a beast at meeting great cinematic style with substance that you can talk about all night. He still makes movies like each one is destined to be the last word on the subject. This could easily pass for a much younger man’s work in the way that it dives into a world of drugs, crime and sex (and bacchanalian combinations of all three) with such fearsome energy and no obvious moral compass, which some viewers find disturbing.
This film’s getting great bad reviews. They’re the kind of bad reviews that make you want to see the movie just to find out if it’s as “dangerous” and “irresponsible” as some say.
Turns out it’s not (but it’s still good). It’s weathering the same criticism that crime movies have received since the silent era, which is that they glorify the criminals. Every gangster movie made during The Depression got the same accusations. In some of those films, the producer would tack on a written disclaimer at the beginning to let everyone know that the studio doesn’t endorse any of the great debauchery that they’re about to see. Shooting people with tommy guns over bootleg liquor isn’t a good thing to do, they want to make absolutely clear, even if they have to send the message with zero subtlety.
Scorsese doesn’t have to do that, though. He makes this film for adults who already know that a life lived on this kind of edge doesn’t last. Some filmmakers like to tell you what to think, but Scorsese isn’t one of them. He doesn’t manipulate. He illustrates.
The film ends up as neither a glorification nor a simple vilification of Jordan Belfort.
It’s about greed. The all-consuming kind where nothing else matters. It’s a predator’s life. The only respites are sex and frying your brain in intoxicants. Greed is the main character in the film. DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort is a great talker with nothing behind the words. Most of them are lies, anyway.
Scorsese shows the wild parties, the orgies and the drugged-out nights because you can’t talk about greed without acknowledging its seductive power. There’s no way around that—not in this story, at least. That sort of decadence is why Belfort’s there, what ruins him and what he misses when it’s all over.
Whether all of that is worth missing is up to you.