You will likely think Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is either a marvelous spoof on avaricious assholes complete with its own brand of sex-and-drugs magical realism, or you’ll find it an excessive glorification of the very depravity it is lampooning. The likelihood that its leg-pulling challenge, its unnerving dare, will polarize its audience is itself refreshing. See this film and it’s further likely, you’ll either love it of hate it. What’s sure is you’ll get an outrageous take, send-up or not, on greed and it’s love child, hedonism.
Securities fraud and money laundering bring on tons of cash which gives rise to drug abuse, frequent prostitutes, even dwarf flinging. Based on Jordan Belfort’s memoir, the film goes over the top to equate the scale of his subsequent desensitized debauchery with the enormity of the sudden wealth obtained from Belfort’s “pump-and-dump” scamming of innocent clients to buy risky stocks. The temporarily enormously inflated stocks were then sold off from “rat hole” accounts controlled by Belfort and his sidekicks, who would be legally required to hold on to them for a designated time if they kept then in their own names. The investors were left with worthless paper.
Belfort made $23million in two hours after one particular deal, $49 million the year he was 26 years old, and ended up with a worth estimated at $200million. Lots of cash was smuggled into Switzerland. Unlike the excellent 2000 film Boiler Room, which also was based on Belfort’s firm, Stratton Oakmont, The Wolf of Wall Street captures the con of Belfort’s incredibly salesmanship, and then zeroes in on its grotesque aftermath.
Belfort was eventually fined $110 million, and sentenced to four years in prison, of which he served 22 months. Once out of jail, 50 percent of Belfort’s gross income as a motivational speaker, often at $30,000 a clip, goes towards the fine. He’s paid $10million so far.
As far as the incessant drug-taking, there are shades of DiPalma’s Scarface here, except, unlike DiPalma, Scorsese goes off the rails into caricature, then like a bumping car hitting the barrier, comes back to an equilibrium, albeit one that remains at all times uncomfortable for the viewer. You’re not about to get the viewpoint of the poor schmuck victims who DiCaprio and company literally give the finger to while on the phone closing their swindling. No, this film is all about the perpetrators. Sandwiched in its three hours of office orgies, fights and mock-fights of its lead players, and $2 million Vegas weekend (counting the “reconstruction costs”) are human interest scenes that are not only highly believable but entertaining in a more conventional Scorsesean sense. Belfort’s scene with his FBI agent pursuer (a very good Kyle Chandler) aboard his nearly 200-foot long yacht is one for the ages as DiCaprio peels off hundred dollar bills (and lobsters!) and tossing them toward the departing FBI agents off the yacht’s balcony. An earlier scene with a riveting Matthew McConaughey as Belfort’s authoritatively wild mentor at his first Wall Street job zings with a table-setting energy and freakishness that forewarns these are not conventional dudes whose world we are about to enter. They’re a special breed, and like McConaughey, they are all about the narcissistic thrill of putting their own rapaciousness above any iota of concern for their clients.
Later scenes with Belfort and his second wife (Margot Robbie) get as close as we will come to any demonstration of a human toll for all the greed and trickery. Yet this movie is about Belfort and, to a lesser extent his right-hand man, Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill). If you think Belfort is getting off scott-free, check out the scene where he is so out of it on quaaludes. DiCaprio needs to channel Buster Keaton and Jerry Lewis when he finds himself at a country club but literally unable to talk or walk. It’s beside the point but interesting nonetheless, that Scorsese has admitted to having his own personal drug abuse demons during the ’70s.
So fault Scorsese, if you must, for going straight to the hundredth floor of overkill parody, staying there for three hours, and finally going out on the balcony waving his fist. If you’re starting to feel a little guilty for enjoying the considerable laughs included in the outrage here, fault him all the more for perhaps attempting to implicate you, the viewer, as part of the problem. Just remember, for all of Stratton Oakmont’s excesses, the number of people hurt were a pittance compared to the damage done a decade or so later once the humongous investment banks, encouraged by deregulation, led us into a debilitating global economic crisis with much the same mind-set of me, me, me. They may not have been snorting coke off of hooker’s bare asses but they exploited an entire country in much the same manner Belfort and his group of clowns ripped off their victims. The particularly obscene outrage typified by Goldman Sachs’ Abacus deal requires an outrageous film, and we get one here in spades.
