Sheep’s clothing

This season has been marked with some disappointment. First, there was Black Nativity, which wasn’t quite as good as I hoped it would be. Now comes Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, which turns out not to be very good at all.

The subject of The Wolf of Wall Street, and the author of the book on which it’s based, is Jordan Belfort, formerly of the firm Stratton Oakmont, which he co-founded with his partner Danny Porush. As portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie—and evidently as described by the man himself in his own book—Belfort is a fast-talking huckster who rose to wealth beyond the dreams of an Arab oil sheik by peddling cheap “penny stocks” to naive investors, hyping the stocks to artificially inflate the price, then selling them off and skimming the profits and commissions from the sales for himself, leaving his supposed clients to take the losses.

Or something like that. To tell the truth, the movie’s Belfort has such a slick line of patter as he narrates his rise from ambitious nobody to master of the universe, even directly addressing the camera in long, caffeinated soliloquies, that it isn’t always easy to follow the exact nuts and bolts of precisely what he did to get there. But we get the point: He was out for No. 1 and up to no good. Apparently, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, then the FBI, got the point as well: Belfort’s ostentatious lifestyle of conspicuous consumption, with plenty of sex and drugs, caught their attention early on, and FBI agent Gregory Coleman spent six years gathering evidence against him. Eventually, Belfort was taken down in 2003, forced to cooperate in prosecuting his former cohorts, sentenced to 22 months in federal prison, and ordered to pay more than $100 million in restitution (most of which, apparently, he still owes). The movie ends with Belfort plying his post-prison trade as a motivational speaker—the same line of snappy patter, but fine-tuned and refocused.

As I said, we get the point. And that’s the problem: We get the point very early on, but director Scorsese and writer Terence Winter keep bringing it home to us over and over again, for a seemingly endless three hours.

Individual scenes and performances work beautifully in The Wolf of Wall Street. Scorsese’s model is his 1990 masterpiece Goodfellas, in which Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill shared his excitement at embracing the life of the gangsters he admired. Wolf has the same breathless pace, the same rat-a-tat narration, the same superlong takes and dizzy tracking shots with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto’s camera careening around among the desks and cubicles of Belfort’s ritzy offices while DiCaprio’s Belfort rattles off his story to us.

But it doesn’t have the same narrative drive of Goodfellas, and that’s the movie’s undoing. Part of it is the difference in subject matter, of course. The dangerous unpredictability of gang life, knowing that any moment can result in a spasm of psychotic violence, carries a charge that we just can’t get from a gang of stockbrokers, no matter how crooked and drug-addled they are. You can watch cocaine being snorted off the bodies of only so many faceless hookers before your eyes glaze over and you start wondering what else these guys do to pass the time.

Still, coming out of The Wolf of Wall Street, I couldn’t help wondering what Scorsese and Winter told the audience in three hours that they couldn’t have done in two-and-a-half, or even two. The energy of the early scenes dissipates as the movie begins spinning its wheels and seems no longer to be going anywhere.

Still, before the surfeit sets in, there are nice touches. Jonah Hill, sporting a mouthful of oversize teeth, is slimy fun as Belfort’s partner, his name changed to Donnie Azoff. (Many of the real characters in Belfort’s story, even both his wives, have had their names changed in Winter’s script.) And DiCaprio has a hilarious (albeit harrowing) scene late in the movie, when Belfort suffers a delayed reaction to an overdose of unstable Quaaludes.

The Wolf of Wall Street is a movie of bits and pieces, not a whole. In the end, it huffs and it puffs, but it doesn’t blow the house down.