By this point we’ve seen the young Belfort’s scruples, both financial and moral, tutored away by his first boss (Matthew McConaughey in a similar part to the one he played in Steven Soderbergh’s excellent 2012 film, Magic Mike)Īnd we’ve seen him humbled by the crash of ‘87, reduced to selling penny stocks out of a Long Island strip mall. There’s a scene early in the film when Jordan Belfort, the stockbroker and lead character played by Leonardo DiCaprio, addresses the trading floor of his fledgling brokerage firm, Stratton Oakmont. When he’s on message, it’s really something.

All of film history and its accrued technique are at his disposal, and he uses it liberally. Not because of some auteurist deference to Scorsese’s place in The Pantheon of Directors, but because he is, for all of his foibles, a master filmmaker. What makes the film queasy viewing is that it’s Marty, and so it can’t be dismissed entirely. “But can’t we have both?” No Marty, I’m afraid we can’t.

This film wants to be both a stinging indictment of late-capitalist excess, and to have a little fun with dwarf-tossing, hookers and quaaludes while we’re at it.

What most certainly is a problem is the way we are positioned in relation to the snorting, fornicating and otherwise un-PC behaviour of those wild and crazy guys in The Wolf of Wall Street. Martin Scorsese and Leonardo Di Caprio at the 2014 Golden Globes.

Original wolf of wall street movie