That's the pace of this movie, and the feel of it. Imagine the last thirty minutes of " GoodFellas" stretched out to three hours. Then a federal prosecutor named Patrick Denham ( Kyle Chandler) enters the picture, sweating Belfort by confronting him on his own turf (including Belfort's yacht) and letting him brag on his own awesomeness until he hangs himself. After a few years, Belfort is living in a mansion that another DiCaprio character, Jay Gatsby, might find gaudy, and buying a yacht, and helicoptering to and from meetings and parties while drugged out of his mind. As McConaughey's character tells Belfort early on, this subset of investing is so scummy that drugs are mandatory: "How the f- else would you do this job?" At one point a broker declares that they're doing all that coke and all those Quaaludes and guzzling all that booze "in order to stimulate our freethinking ideas."īelfort is married when the tale begins, to a good and respectable woman who doesn't approve of his financial shenanigans or chronic infidelity, but he soon throws her over for a blond and curvy trophy named Naomi LaPaglia (Australian actress Margot Robbie), then marries her and starts supporting her in the style to which they've both become accustomed. His office enforcer is his volcanic dad ( Rob Reiner), who screams about expenditures and workplace sleaze, but often seems to live vicariously through the trading floor's young wolves.īelfort's right hand man Donnie Azoff ( Jonah Hill) is perhaps even more conscienceless than Belfort: a hefty wiseass with gleaming choppers who quits his job at a diner after one conversation with the hero, joins his scheme, helps him launder money, and introduces him to crack-as if Belfort didn't have enough intoxicants in his system, on top of the adrenaline he generates by making deals and bedding every halfway attractive woman who crosses his path. Byrne), "The Depraved Chinaman" Chester Ming ( Kenneth Choi), and Brad Bodnick ( Jon Bernthal), a DeNiro-esque neighborhood hothead who's known as the Quaalude King of Bayside. All have both given names and Damon Runyon-esque nicknames: Robbie Feinberg, aka "Pinhead" (Brian Sacca), Alden Kupferberg, aka "Sea Otter" ( Henry Zebrowski), the dreadfully-toupeed "Rugrat" Nicky Koskoff (P.J. This Robin Hood-in-reverse builds himself a team of merry men drawn from various sundry corners of his life. Taking its cues from gangster pictures, " Wolf" shows how Belfort rose from humble origins, becoming rich and notorious (the title comes from an unflattering magazine profile that caught the attention of federal prosecutors). Belfort was indicted in 1998 for money laundering and securities fraud, spent nearly two years in federal prison and was ordered to pay back $110 million to investors he'd deceived. Per Wikipedia, at its peak, "the firm employed over 1000 stock brokers and was involved in stock issues totaling more than $1 billion, including an equity raising for footwear company Steve Madden Ltd." Belfort and his company specialized in " pump and dump" operations: artificially blowing up the value of a nearly worthless stock, then selling it at a big profit, after which point the value drops and the investors lose their money. He reinvented himself on Long Island by taking over a penny stock boiler room and giving it an old money name, Stratton Oakmont, to gain the confidence of middle- and working-class investors. The middle-class, Queens-raised Belfort tried and failed to establish himself on Wall Street in a more traditional way-we see his tutelage in the late '80s at a blue chip firm, under the wing of a grinning sleazeball played by Matthew McConaughey-but got laid off in the market crash of 1987.
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