So much ink has been expended on the vices and virtues of The Wolf Of Wall Street since its US release that I feel like I'm walking behind the giant parade with a shovel and a shit-barrow. So let me be the clean-up man before the dust settles. First there's this heated, nonsensical debate about whether or not Martin Scorsese's movie is, to quote Leonard Maltin, "without a moral centre". In The Wolf Of Wall Street, there's a shot of an honest FBI agent riding the subway home on his crappy government wage, while his day job is chasing down stone-hearted penny-stock cheats who make in a moment what he earns in a decade. That's more moral centre, or law-enforcement presence, than you'll find in GoodFellas and Casino combined. And so what if it really does have no moral centre? The job of grown-up moviegoers is to establish their own moral relationship to the material, something I first learned when GoodFellas opened in London alongside Drugstore Cowboy and Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer, a troika entirely bereft of moral hand-holding or finger-wagging. People seem to have forgotten the notion of the antihero. Ever read a Flashman novel? You like Dexter? The Sopranos? Great, you're all caught up.
Three hours of sexual and pharmacological excess, wanton debauchery, unfathomable avarice, gleeful misogyny, extreme narcotic brinksmanship, malfeasance and lawless behaviour is a lot to take, and some have complained of the film's relentlessness, which, if understood in formal terms, I think may be one of its main aims. We are supposed to be engorged, bloated, perhaps even nauseated, and certainly exhausted by Scorsese's kinetic onslaught of image and sound, but also in the process to be exhilarated and seduced by everything we say we hold in contempt. There are stretches in the movie's second half when the sugar-rush wears off and you remember to feel faintly dirty for a moment, and then Scorsese – and, in the most astonishingly energetic performance of his career, Leonardo DiCaprio – hurl us back into the seething, zoo-like trading pit once more, and our collective heart-rate rises again.
The movie excels in its many trading-floor sequences, great chaotic indoor crowd-scenes worthy of Raoul Walsh, in which we can glimpse the primal, quasi-animalistic governing urges that propel an unregulated – that's to say, totally lawless – free-market economy, as the hawks are granted licence to feast upon the sparrows. Le Grand Bouffe, indeed: party till you puke.
Elsewhere: Jon Bernthal gets more fun to watch in every new thing he shows up in; this movie might make you want to murder Jonah Hill; and Margot Robbie in the nude, oiled up, golden and shaven, looks scarily like an Oscar statuette. Let it be Best Picture!
