Perhaps it's not obvious what Belfort has to tell us about Wall Street's decadence that hasn't already been said by Oliver Stone's Gordon Gekko or indeed Tom Wolfe's Sherman McCoy.
It's entertainingly outrageous, and there's a shaggy-dog comic effect in seeing the same nightmare debauch over and over, although I don't think the coke'n'strippers war stories exactly constitute that critique of capitalism that some pundits have claimed for this film. While Hill luxuriated in the minutiae and details of gangsterdom, and Sam Rothstein gave some feel for what the gambling world was about in Scorsese's Casino (1995), Belfort will often stop in the middle of explaining a financial scam, and say that we don't want to hear about anything as boringly technical as this – surely what we want is the naked girls and the wild times, and that's what we get. The comparison with Hill is actually inexact: what Jordan wants to be specifically is rich, and shifting stocks on Wall Street is the way to do it. The vulpine salesman's broad smile is still more or less in place. Leonardo DiCaprio – credited as producer, alongside Scorsese – plays Belfort and his character gets to the end of this long movie having learned nothing, conceded nothing and even physically changed in no obvious way. Finally, like Henry Hill before him, Belfort has to swallow hard and confront the possibility of betraying his partners to minimise the inevitable jail term. It is based on the memoirs of crooked broker Jordan Belfort who during the 1980s and 90s enjoyed unlimited amounts of sports cars, drugs and prostitutes, paid for by millions of dupes and dopes buying his fraudulently inflated stocks. This movie sprints frantically, in the direction of nowhere in particular, like our appalling hero after his first ecstatic toke of crack cocaine. I've watched it twice in quick succession now, and though it skirts the edge of cliche, the sheer sustained blitz of bad taste is spectacular. It's a raucous, crazily energised, if occasionally slightly shallow epic on a familiar subject, conducted in the classic voiceover-nostalgia style with sugar-rush jukebox slams on the soundtrack.
I f you can imagine the honey-gravel of Ray Liotta's voice in Goodfellas saying: "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a stockbroker" you'll get some idea of Martin Scorsese's new movie The Wolf of Wall Street.
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