The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Based on the autobiography of real-life stockbroker Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street arrived in cinemas in late 2013 and promptly divided audiences and critics in roughly equal measure. Belfort's memoir, published in 2007, recounts his rise through the brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont during the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period of spectacular excess and equally spectacular fraud on the American financial markets. The story had already attracted a degree of notoriety in print before Hollywood came calling, and it is not difficult to see why: the combination of securities fraud, mob connections, industrial-scale drug use, and operatic self-destruction is the sort of material that screenwriters dream about. Terence Winter, whose television work on The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire had already demonstrated a flair for morally complicated men doing monstrous things with considerable charm, adapted the book. The result is a film that runs to three full hours and shows very little interest in apologising for that fact.

Martin Scorsese, directing from Red Granite Pictures and his own Sikelia Productions, was by this point one of the most discussed filmmakers working in American cinema, with a catalogue stretching back decades and including several films in this very genre. Readers who want a sense of where he had been before might find it useful to look at the site's reviews of The King of Comedy or Gangs of New York, both of which deal, in very different registers, with ambition, performance, and the darker edges of the American dream. The Wolf of Wall Street sits in that same broad tradition while pushing the comic register considerably further than most of his previous work. The production is polished but deliberately overwhelming, the camera rarely settling, the editing calibrated to keep the viewer slightly off-balance, which is, one suspects, precisely the point.

The cast assembled around the central story is worth pausing on. Leonardo DiCaprio, who had worked with Scorsese on several previous projects and whose broader filmography the site has touched on elsewhere (see the reviews of Blood Diamond and The Beach), takes the role of Belfort himself. Jonah Hill appears as Belfort's closest associate, Donnie Azoff, a performance that earned him his second Academy Award nomination. Margot Robbie, in one of her earlier major Hollywood roles, plays Naomi, Belfort's second wife. Matthew McConaughey appears in a comparatively brief but frequently discussed early scene as a senior broker who more or less sets the whole moral framework of the film in motion. Kyle Chandler rounds out the principal cast as the FBI agent tasked with building a case against Belfort. It is, on paper, a formidable ensemble, and the film leans heavily on that collective energy throughout its considerable length. For a point of comparison with other crime pictures covered on this site, the reviews of Little Caesar and The Raid 2 give a reasonable sense of the range of approaches the genre allows.

Three hours of pure, uncut greed, delivered with the energy of a guy who’s just discovered espresso and Red Bull can be mixed. And at the center of it all: Leonardo DiCaprio, chewing scenery like it’s gourmet steak and spitting out motivational speeches that make you want to rob a bank… or at least start a pyramid scheme. Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio) isn’t just a salesman, he’s a sorcerer. A man who could sell ice to a polar bear and then convince it to fund his yacht. His pitch is pure charisma, bravado, and the kind of unshakable confidence that makes you question why you’re not already a millionaire. The film doesn’t just show how he scams the rubes, it makes you the rube, hypnotized by his chaos. Jonah Hill’s Donnie Azoff is the unhinged id to Belfort’s calculated ego, and Margot Robbie’s Naomi is aspirational, untouchable. Scorsese directs this like a hyperactive maestro conducting a symphony of excess: drugs, hookers, Qualudes, yachts, tiny helicopters, and enough suits to cloth a small nation. The editing is relentless, the dialogue rapid-fire, and the moral compass is tossed out the window at the 20-minute mark. It’s not subtle, but subtlety doesn’t belong in a film where a stockbroker ODs on the trading floor and gets revived with a syringe to the neck. It's absolutely too long but it’s also a masterclass in how to make corruption entertaining. The film never winks at the audience, it just lets the madness unfold, trusting us to decide whether we’re laughing at the idiocy or with it.

What stays with me, sitting with all of that, is how rarely a film this long manages to feel genuinely propulsive rather than simply exhausting. For me, the Belfort story works precisely because the film refuses to hand you an easy moral exit: there is no tidy reckoning, no cathartic moment where the machine visibly breaks. You are left to do that work yourself, which is either a sign of confidence or a provocation, and I suspect Scorsese knew it was both. Whether your sympathies land where the film expects them to is, I think, the question it is actually asking. It is not always comfortable viewing, but comfortable was never really on the menu.

Rating: ★★★★  | Year: 2013  | Watched: 2025-06-15

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Trailer

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Martin Scorsese: Italianamerican (1974) · The King of Comedy (1982) · Gangs of New York (2002) · Cape Fear (1991)
More with Leonardo DiCaprio: Blood Diamond (2006) · The Beach (2000) · One Battle After Another (2025) · Gangs of New York (2002)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)
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