Those who’ve always suspected that the stock market was full of shit, a speculative Ponzi scheme, will delight in how Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter treat “the Street” as an elaborate con game - hell, at one point, Belfort (whose narration frequently involves direct address to camera) stops in the midst of an explanation of IPOs to give us a smile and a smug “I know you’re not following what I’m saying.” They know it’s double talk they’re banking on it.

The film treats Wall Street with the same cynical contempt. He gets his first job working for a big-shot broker named Mark Hanna (played by Matthew McConaughey, in a brief but delicious turn), who sits him down for lunch on his first day and explains exactly what they are, and what they do. The film is based on the memoir of Belfort, a “former member of the middle class” who became a millionaire by manipulating the market and running a penny-stock boiler room.

The message is clear: this is America, and these are the greedy, drug-fueled children who just about drove it into the fucking ground. Scorsese then hard-cuts to a dwarf-tossing competition on the sales floor. “Stratton-Oakmont is America.” That’s the name of their firm, introduced in the dignified television commercial that opens the movie, in which a gravitas-dripping narrator explains the company’s responsibility and respectability. “This right here is the land of opportunity,” Jordan Belfort tells his fellow stockbrokers, in the midst of one of his high-energy company meetings on the sales floor, about midway through Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street.

Wolf of wall street movie length