Nothing he did in that movie seemed at all enviable or desirable.

I was revolted by Jordan Belfort, pretty deep-down revolted, and I actually wondered about the future safety of the real-life Belfort, considering how awfully he comes off in this film. Not in an Inferno-esque way, not by a guide or with an eye toward metaphor, but in a very literal, very illustrative way. Walking out of The Wolf of Wall Street, I felt like I’d just been dragged through hell. With his ill-gained money, he indulged in an almost unbelievable drug habit, harrowing amounts of paid-for sex, and took consumerism to its logical conclusion. Jordan Belfort, who has more or less picked himself up and dusted himself off, is a guy who defrauded many, many people, all for the personal gain of himself and his associates, and, either in a direct or indirect way, contributed to the financial collapse of this country. The point they do have is this: Jordan Belfort is, or was, a bad dude. The majority of great art, in one way or another, confronts some difficult aspect of life as a human being, whether it’s sin, destitution, weird sex, or whatever. And these people have a point, but I think they’re wrong. These people argue that The Wolf of Wall Street should not exist, that its subject and narrative inherently glorify a dude who does not deserve to be glorified. Not for reasons of film, either that’s a different discussion. Even better if that game is a loss.īut even if you were to scrape the film down and tighten it up into a 150-minute, or even 120-minute, capsule, some people still wouldn’t be happy. The Wolf of Wall Street is a good movie that could’ve been a very good movie, though I’m not sure it really has greatness in it, except for the performances, which are great in the way that a basketball player scoring 60 points in a game is great. As a film, The Wolf of Wall Street suffers from this overindulgence in spectacle-it bogs down and scatters an otherwise well-written, witty script and takes away from Scorsese’s colorfully agile direction. And if The Wolf of Wall Street were cut down from three hours long, it would likely involve trimming much of the hedonistic fat that has made it such a cause de celebre for opponents of the financial institutions it depicts, their excesses and sociopathy and general disregard for anything outside of themselves.

Except for very rare cases-like, once-every-decade-rare cases-a movie does not need to be three hours long. If nothing else, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is a pretty good case study for the debate over whether any movie needs to be three hours long.

The wolf of wall street movie