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Riding herd on them all is Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill), a buffoonish caricature of a Jew in WASP Land, decked out in garish bleached teeth, clear-lens horn-rims and a sweater tied ever so carefully around his neck. He assembles a merry band of brokers comprised of petty thugs, drug dealers and high-school dropouts who, when trained in Belfort’s precision-scripted tactics, prove to be remarkably effective salesmen. It isn’t long before Belfort branches out on his own, starting the tony-sounding Stratton Oakmont in a declasse former gas station, resolving to go from “selling garbage to garbagemen” to targeting the deep-pocketed one percent. But the genial proprietor (an uncredited Spike Jonze) agrees to give him a shot, not quite realizing he’s just let a wolf in the door.
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Nobody, that is, save for a storefront brokerage in a Long Island strip mall, where the slovenly staff unloads worthless penny stocks on cold-called clients for 50% commissions, and where Belfort sticks out like a Savile Row suit on a Kmart clearance rack.
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Rothschild, sending him back to the help-wanted ads at a time when nobody seems to be looking for stockbrokers. Pangloss.īut no sooner has Jordan settled in than Black Monday arrives and the bottom falls out, of the market and L.F. And even though he’s no longer quite boyish enough to play someone in his early 20s, DiCaprio is convincingly green here, like a wide-eyed Candide lunching with McConaughey’s debauched Dr. It’s there that the eager rookie gets his first sense of the wild life to come when a mad-hatter senior broker ( Matthew McConaughey) takes him out for a three-martini lunch that also includes enough white powder for a killer day at Big Bear. The movie begins in medias res, with Belfort and his devoted minions blowing off steam in an office dwarf-tossing competition, before flashing back to give us a brief glimpse of the young and relatively innocent Jordan, who arrives on Wall Street in the fall of 1987 as a “connector” - basically a glorified phone dialer - for the old-money trading firm of L.F. It is the sort of office where a bathroom placard kindly reminds everyone not to engage in intercourse on the premises during office hours - right where the “Employees Must Wash Hands” sign usually goes. Rather, they take Belfort on his own questionable terms, seeking to reproduce the atmosphere of crazed, alpha-male intensity that engulfed the trading floor at Stratton Oakmont, the Belfort-founded brokerage house which, in “Wolf,” comes to resemble a Boschian Rome before the fall. Nor have Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter brought any retroactive moralizing to bear on the material. In the prologue to “Wolf,” the first of two volumes of memoirs, Belfort wrote that he hoped his story would serve as “a cautionary tale to the rich and poor alike,” though there was little in the 500 pages that followed (or in the cover line, “I partied like a rock star, lived like a king”) that suggested contrition. If some of the advance hype suggested that “Wolf” was going to be a kind of “Goodfellas” on Wall Street, in reality it’s more like the jittery, paranoid third act of that movie stretched out to three hours, starting at a fever pitch and heading toward the nuclear. In the first reel alone, which aptly sets the tone for what’s to come, Belfort (DiCaprio) can be seen snorting coke off a prostitute’s backside, getting fellated while driving his white Ferrari, and nearly crashing his private helicopter while high on a homemade cocktail of Quaaludes, Xanax and morphine (the last one “because it’s awesome”). After going unexpectedly kid-friendly for 2011’s “Hugo” (his first PG movie in two decades), Scorsese could hardly have followed with a more dramatic about-face than “Wolf,” which skirts the very outer limits of the R rating with its nonstop barrage of drug-fueled decadence, all put across with a sinister smile.