In fact, there’s very little modern music, with Howlin’ Wolf’s pounding Smokestack Lightning accompanying much of the mayhem. His camera stays longer than it used to, and though the trailer suggests lots of jittery rap, the needle-drops are shorter and less foregrounded than usual. Anderson spring to mind - but the sense that this is determined not to be a typical Scorsese movie. Here, one can detect not only a little hint of his godchildren - Tarantino and P. His Personal Journey series of docs famously stop at the point when he started making movies himself, so he doesn’t have to judge his peers, but The Wolf Of Wall Street has the air of a filmmaker looking round for ideas.
It could just be that, for once, Scorsese has been looking around him. And it is the genius of the film, not only in Scorsese’s direction but in Leonardo DiCaprio’s untouchable performance, that three hours in the company of a man who exploits the poor and wallows in obscene wealth simply whizzes by.
Like the very best of Scorsese’s work, it involves an antihero who pushes us to the very limits of our sympathy - Jake LaMotta, Rupert Pupkin, Travis Bickle - but Jordan Belfort might be the worst of the bunch. On paper, the story of Jordan Belfort seems tailor-made for him - it is a criminal’s survivor story, with Wall Street as the Cosa Nostra of our times - but this isn’t GoodFellas with stocks and shares it is a film with one eye on us, the audience. It’s big but not Gangs-Of-New-York epic, and it finally seems as though Scorsese is once again interrogating the material, finding the substance of the piece. With The Wolf Of Wall Street, the director’s early energy comes flooding back. That the comedy is so effortless is another striking thing about Scorsese’s 23rd feature, since it is his first film since 1999’s Bringing Out The Dead - also rich in black humour - that doesn’t seem to be made to an Academy agenda. But the oddest thing of all about The Wolf Of Wall Street is also the most unusual for a Scorsese film: it is incredibly, incredibly funny. Though it starts with a dash of the usual visual pyrotechnics, the tone is much straighter than we’ve come to expect, with longer, more intimate scenes and a much greater emphasis on script. It arrives as Casino did with a lot of fanfare, but doesn’t quite deliver what many of us were expecting, and for some, it’s a film that might take a little bit of getting used to. The Wolf Of Wall Street is the first Martin Scorsese film in a good while that feels as though, in a few years' time, it will join Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and GoodFellas in the canon.
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