I think this is part of a larger evolution (I won’t say advance) in his career: from Mean Streets to The Wolf of Wall Street. Few directors can rip through three hours as quickly as Scorsese, but it’s still a lot.
It’s a slick and glitzy movie about slick and glitzy lifestyles, but also a movie with a bloated running time. Scorsese himself refers to it as at least being a sequel to Goodfellas, taking us into a world of even greater excess: more money, more colour, more drugs, more music, and just more. Some people see this as the third part of a trilogy of gangster movies Scorsese made, the first two parts being Mean Streets and Goodfellas.
