That sentiment is far too lofty for Jordan. Gordon Gekko, the lizard of “Wall Street,” proclaimed that greed is good. Jordan is forthright about the ecstasies of money - the pills, women, cars and other toys it allows him to buy, and above all the pure dopamine rush of acquiring more - and indifferent to anything else.

As Jordan (a real person whose memoir is the source of Terence Winter’s screenplay), he achieves a kind of superhuman shallowness. Playing a plantation owner in “ Django Unchained,” he savored the sulfurous corruption of an older ruling class. DiCaprio a chance to explore the romantic side of wealth. “ The Great Gatsby“ (this year’s other major motion picture about a rich criminal with a mansion on Long Island) gave Mr. This movie may tire you out with its hammering, swaggering excess, but it is never less than wide-awake.Īt the center of the whirlwind is Jordan Belfort, a crooked stock trader played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who has recently become the handsome cinematic face of extreme capitalism. Even the occasional lapses of filmmaking technique (scenes that drag on too long, shots that don’t match, noticeable continuity glitches) feel like signs of life. “ Goodfellas,” a sprawling inquiry into how some men do business, is an obvious precedent, and so is “ Mean Streets,” an intensive study of how some men get into trouble. Scorsese has thrown himself into filmmaking with this kind of exuberance. Then as now, the movie is likely to be the subject of intense scholarly debate: Does it offer a sustained and compelling diagnosis of the terminal pathology that afflicts us, or is it an especially florid symptom of the disease?įrom its opening sequence - a quick, nasty, unapologetic tour through its main character’s vices and compulsions, during which he crash-lands a helicopter on the grounds of his Long Island estate and (not simultaneously) shares cocaine with a call girl in an anatomically creative manner - to its raw, chaotic finish, “The Wolf of Wall Street” hums with vulgar, voyeuristic energy. Future archaeologists, digging through the digital and physical rubble of our long-gone civilization in search of reasons for its collapse, will be greatly helped if they unearth a file containing “The Wolf of Wall Street,” Martin Scorsese’s three-hour bacchanal of sex, drugs and conspicuous consumption.

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