The film's directorial high point is a Belfort-Azoff Quaalude binge that spirals into comic madness, with Azoff blubbering and freaking out and impulsively stuffing his face and collapsing, and Belfort suffering paralysis during a panicked phone call about his money and then crawling towards his car like a nearly-roadkilled animal, one agonizing inch at a time. These moments of humiliation—and there are a lot of them, including an instantly gif-worthy moment of Belfort paying a prostitute to stick a lit candle in his bum—coexist with moments that get off on the men's howling and profit-making and chest-thumping.
We're supposed to figure out how we feel about the mix of modes, and accept that if there were no appeal to this sort of behavior, nobody would indulge in it. This doesn't seem wishy-washy. It feels true.
Scorsese and Winter never lose track of the bigger picture, though. "Wolf" starts with a Fellini-like party on the floor of Belfort's fantastically successful boiler-room operation, freeze-framing on an image of Belfort tossing a dwarf at a huge velcro target, literally and figuratively abusing the Little Guy. They get away with it because we don't see ourselves as the little guy, but the little guy who might some day rise in this land of opportunity and become the big guy who's doing the tossing.
Скорсезе и Винтер не теряют и чуство целого. "Волк" начинается со сцены в духе Фелини, в бойлерной очень успешного предприятия Белфорт. Это как бы моментальная фотография - Белфорд швыряет карлика на мишень-липучку, - оскорбительное и болезненное действие. Авторас удаётся эта сцена, видимо, потому, что мы себя не отождествляем с маленьким человечком, но скорее с человеком, который может и вырости, используя имеющиеся возможности, и стать уже тем большим человеком, который сам двигает людьми.
