As is often the case in Scorsese's movies, "Wolf" gives alpha male posturing the attraction-repulsion treatment, serving up the drugging and whoring and getting-over as both spectacle and cautionary tale. In his most exuberant performance since "Titanic," DiCaprio plays Belfort as a pipsqueak Mussolini of the trading floor, a swaggering jock who pumps his guys up by calling them "killers" and "warriors." Belfort attracts hungry and self-destructive women, partly via brashness and baby-faced good looks, but mostly by flashing green:
he's a nearly worthless person made important by the size of his wallet. The film lacks the mild distancing that Scorsese brought to "GoodFellas" and "Casino"—the former contrasting Henry Hill's matter-of-fact narration with occasionally shocked reactions to bloodshed, the latter adopting a Stanley Kubrick-like chilly detachment, as if everyone involved were narrating from a cloud in Heaven or a pit in Hell; "Wolf," though, is in the thick of things at all times, to suffocating effect. Scorsese and his editor Schoonmaker challenge the audience to come to their own conclusions about the behavior they're seeing onscreen, depriving the viewer of the usual moral anchors.