The Wolf Of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013) - 5 stars

In the past twelve months, Leonardo DiCaprio has given us some fine performances as rich, immoral men and his performance as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf Of Wall Street is no exception. Of course, he is not the richest; his Great Gatsby role takes that medal. Nor is he the most immoral; Django Unchained’s  Calvin Candie surely outweighs him there. However, this is his best performance of the lot. In fact, it is his best performance in a long time, and maybe the one that could finally win him that elusive Academy Award.

The film, based upon Jordan Belfort’s book of the same name, and directed by Martin Scorsese, charters Belfort’s rise and fall as a stockbroker in the late 1980’s and 1990’s. It opens with Belfort starting at a major Wall Street company and his introduction to this new world by his boss played by Matthew McConaughey. Despite only featuring for barely ten minutes, McConaughey shines in the role, a sort of mentor to Belfort, and the one responsible for seducing him to Wall Street and the addictions available to him there: sex, drugs and most of all, money. As he gets more and more addicted to the high of earning millions of dollars, the price he pays grows and grows until finally the FBI catch on to his illegal means. The bulk of the film features a very criminal Belfort spending and throwing away his millions before Agent Denham can put him away.

Aside from McConaughey and Marty’s now five-time collaborator DiCaprio, the film is full of stunning supporting performances from Kyle Chandler, Jean Dujardin, Joanna Lumley and especially Jonah Hill, once again proving he is not just a Judd Apatow puppet.

The genius of the film is that at once it feels so familiar as a Scorsese picture, but also completely fresh. A fan of the director’s can see his hands at work throughout the film; the use of soundtrack, the steadicam shots, the obsession with the underworld. There is even a voiceover that takes you back to Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. Certainly, you could imagine DiCaprio opening this film with the line “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a millionaire.” However, this doesn’t make it feel like tired work, or a rerun of his devices. On the contrary, everything about the film feels like untouched snow, pushing boundaries of acceptability to their limit. Every visual in the film shows another scene of decadence and debauchery with the stock broker office looking more and more like a fight club than a work place, while every word in Terence Winter’s script is laced with depravity, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the better work of authors Brett Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk. The very fact that this is a true story makes it all the more exciting to watch, and you certainly cannot imagine anyone else helming this film other than Scorsese.

The Wolf Of Wall Street is a 3 hour cocaine high, complete with the downs and the withdrawals and while it may run ever so slightly longer than necessary, you leave the cinema addicted, needing another hit. Another bump. Another scene. Just one last time.