I had been interested for some time in watching The Wolf of Wall Street. I’m not sure why I was really interested in it, as I’m not terribly interested in finance or the history of its madness, but the movie had been on my to-watch list, and finally I sat down last night and watched it. On looking at Martin Scorsese’s page on IMDB, I see that I’ve watched a lot fewer of his films than I had thought, but my general impression has generally been that I like his films. Right or wrong, I think of his work as gritty and real. This is the impression I brought to watching The Wolf of Wall Street, which I did not think turned out to be a very good movie at all.

I don’t think I have a great eye for such things, but even I noticed a number of really bad edits — hands moved or drinks suddenly refilled as the camera angle switched, pants suddenly adorning what had been a bare bottom without there having been opportunity to slip them on. I figure that if I noticed a few of these, there must have been many more that a better trained eye would have seen, so the movie struck me as rather sloppily edited.

It was also grotesque. Of course, the behavior of the characters depicted was grotesque, and so a grotesque depiction seems well enough in order. What I mean to say is not that the grotesqueness itself is inappropriate but that the manner of its assembly seemed wrong. Often I felt like the movie was a string of clips from a gag reel: the boys snort cocaine off of some hookers’ bodies; the boys do too many quaaludes; the boys have an orgy; the boys crack wise about little people; the boys tape lots of money to their friend’s wife; DiCaprio effectively does a Gilbert Grape impersonation. Yes, we are seeing here the sort of excess that I suppose the movie is supposed to criticize, but it feels like a series of snapshots, and it gets a little old and feels pieced together. Often enough it feels more like a variant on the Hangover franchise.

The Hangover movies are surely funny at times (well, I assume — I’ve seen only the first one and didn’t love it but also probably laughed at it), but they have no real moral center. From a Scorsese film about Wall Street, I suppose I had expected at least some cynicism or a sense of quiet outrage about the excesses depicted, but I watched instead a film that seemed to make comedy of it all. Maybe it wasn’t a bad film as much as that it wasn’t the film I expected, which is more my fault than Scorsese’s.

And it’s entirely possible that I’ve simply misread the film. It is a narration for the most part from the perspective of the main character, who breaks the fourth wall from time to time. This device seems reasonable enough in a movie based on a book written by that character. Maybe what I’m reading as a weakness in the film is in fact the point of the film. That is, a cautionary tale told by a purportedly reformed scoundrel might in fact unfold in the way this film does, reveling more in the chain of zany exploits than in the reclamation of any true morality. How many times have I myself told gleeful stories of youthful debauchery without lingering overmuch on the regret and the hangover that followed? Is the film about this phenomenon as much as about Jordan Belfort’s particular exploits, and is the film perhaps cynical or moralistic after all, suggesting that there really is no such thing as redemption for such scoundrels? Does the book unfold in a similar manner, and is the film a critique of the book?

Even with this revised reading in mind, I didn’t love the film. It could be shorter and better edited and meaningful with a little less slapstick. I haven’t yet read any reviews of it, but I can’t help feeling that if it was favorably reviewed, it was more on the basis of its director’s reputation than on the merits of the film itself.