The Wolf of Wall Street

Dir. Martin Scorsese. 2013, 180 mins. DCP. With Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill and Margot Robbie. Scorsese’s carnivalesque chronicle of financial excess is a bawdy and scathing social satire, following real-life investor and scam artist Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio) through his many drug-addled fraudulent escapades. Based on Belfort’s high-pulp memoir of the same name (the optioning of which made Belfort a million dollars richer), The Wolf of Wall Street follows the time-tested neo-gangster plot structure of Scorsese favorites like Goodfellas and Casino, in which a character’s meteoric rise is followed by a swift downfall. Yet The Wolf of Wall Street’s subversive power comes from a story and performances that refuse to conform to any molds or expectations, in which the line between deadpan mockery and dead seriousness seems to simply melt away.