Scorsese: The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

The Wolf of Wall Street is based on the bestselling memoir by Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), which describes how he became one of the richest people in America through sustained security fraud. One of Belfort’s most prominent strategies was to sell worthless stocks to inexperienced customers – in effect, to sell nothing to nobodies – meaning that it was a career that subsisted less on providing goods than in raising the process of circulation itself to a fever pitch. As a result, Scorsese opts to tell Belfort’s story through a series of ever-expanding orgies of creative destruction that play out as so many efforts to render circulation visible; they’re not merely exponentially ingenious arrangements for acquiring and spending money, but for losing money as well, since Belfort and his team quickly find themselves in a position where they have more money than they can possibly spend. In that sense, it plays out as something like a corporate kama sutra – a series of positions and techniques that provide just enough loss, or discomfort, to ensure that Belfort’s accumulation of pleasure remains meaningful. And, at three hours in length, that’s quite a staggering achievement – it’s a testament to Scorsese’s visual inventiveness and choreography that the orgies, which tend to be most memorable when they actually take place on the trading-room floor, continually manage to reimagine themselves anew. Certainly, it’s always careening at the very precipice of hyper-tedium, always on the verge of conceding that the late 80s/early 90s Wall Street it celebrates has been utterly exhausted, annihilated and demystified, but that adds just the right amount of desperation to propel Scorsese – and Belfort – to ever-greater heights of inspired inanity, to the point where we’re not asked to identify with Belfort so much as to be intoxicated by him; the film treats us as much as Belfort treats his stockroom acolytes and, later, the audiences of his motivational seminars – it evangelises to us while ostensibly entertaining us. That’s the perfect register for DiCaprio’s thaumaturgic diction – it’s undoubtedly his best collaboration with Scorsese – as well as sending Scorsese himself into a headlong, tasteless frenzy that feels genuinely adventurous compared to his late career classicism, as well as making for his funniest film since Goodfellas.