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The Wolf of Wall Street tells the real-life tale of Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker and playboy who was making almost a million dollars a week by the time he was 26 years old.
Starting at the bottom in a boiler room with Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey), his boss who takes an instant shine to him and gives him some tips on how to get through the day, which partly involves shoving various powders up one’s nose, Jordan is determined to stay the course, stay clean and work towards his qualifications.
Six months after starting, on October 19th, 1987, he becomes a qualified stockbroker and ready to take on the world, so to speak, but that also happens to be Black Monday, the day the stockmarket took a massive tumble of over 500 points. Within a month, the company was shut down and Jordan ended up working in a place called Investors Centre, a small company that deals in penny stocks, selling to people who can’t afford them in large number.
Jordan’s talent allows him to impress upon potential clients – or “schmucks” as they keep referring to them – that these companies will soon be worth a fortune. As he goes on to build up his own empire, Stratton Oakmont, a newspaper exposé reveals his dodgy practices and dubs him “The Wolf of Wall Street”, hence the film’s title, and the tale is told from there, with the FBI taking an interest in his activities before too long.
The Wolf of Wall Street rattles along at a decent pace, but you can’t escape the fact that it definitely does *feel* like a three hour film.
Check out page 2 for more thoughts on the film.
Leonardo DiCaprio embodies the role of Jordan Belfort and plays it perfectly, but it does have a feeling of Goodfellas 20 years on, but with stockbrokers intead of mafia, and with DiCaprio instead of Liotta, since there are times when he’s addressing the audience directly, right in the middle of a scene, in front of everyone. Scorsese has every right to use this technique, and I can see why he has, but there’s something about its use here that just feels a bit off.
Margot Robbie plays Naomi, the model who was to later become his wife, and who is played with a voice like Lois Griffin from Family Guy. I can only presume that’s her real voice. There’s also great support from Jonah Hill as Donnie Azoff, who lives in the same low-rent apartment as Jordan early on in the film and who ends up working for him, Matthew McConaughey‘s all-too brief appearance as Mark Hanna, Rob Reiner as Jordan’s father Max, and a great turn from Kyle Chandler as FBI Agent Patrick Denham.
The Wolf of Wall Street has broken all records for the number of swear words in a film. The total is around 500, but it does help that it’s a very long film so it can fit that many in. On another comparison, Goodfellas also broke the record at the time with around 250 f-words.
On BBC’s Breakfast, on Monday January 13th, BBFC Acting Director Mark Austin (below) was interviewed to discuss this. As you can see in this video, he explains that it’s not just the swearing that garnered the film an 18-certificate, but also certain other scenes, and as he describes them, it causes Susanna Reid to wonder whether Breakfast should also be classified 18!
Conversely, Dubai have censored the film such that around 45 minutes have been excised, including scenes regarding sex and drug-taking, leaving the film “incomprehensible” and angering film buffs.
In addition, there are a handful of odd little continuity errors here and there, such as when people are looking in different directions between camera cuts, and also in one early scene where Belfort first meets Jonah Hill’s character, the camera view changes and Jordan’s still talking while he’s now seen to be eating.
Overall, The Wolf of Wall Street is a long three hours, but it does need that time to tell the story. And it’s a good story, but it’s a hell of a lot to take in, in one go.
Cert: 
Running time: 180 minutes
Year: 2013
Released: January 17th 2014
Widescreen: 2.35:1 (several formats used)
Rating: 7/10
Director: Martin Scorsese
Producers: Riza Aziz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Joey McFarland, Martin Scorsese and Emma Tillinger Koskoff
Screenplay: Terence Winter (based on the book by Jordan Belfort)
Cast:
Jordan Belfort: Leonardo DiCaprio
Donnie Azoff: Jonah Hill
Naomi Lapaglia: Margot Robbie
Mark Hanna: Matthew McConaughey
Agent Patrick Denham: Kyle Chandler
Max Belfort: Rob Reiner
Brad: Jon Bernthal
Manny Riskin: Jon Favreau
Jean Jacques Saurel: Jean Dujardin
Aunt Emma: Joanna Lumley
Teresa Petrillo: Cristin Milioti
Leah Belfort: Christine Ebersole
Captain Ted Beecham: Shea Whigham
Chantalle: Katarina Cas
Nicky Koskoff (‘Rugrat’): P.J. Byrne
Chester Ming: Kenneth Choi
Robbie Feinberg (‘Pinhead’): Brian Sacca
Alden Kupferberg (‘Sea Otter’): Henry Zebrowski
Toby Welch: Ethan Suplee
Peter DeBlasio: Barry Rothbart
Steve Madden: Jake Hoffman
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.
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