The Wolf of Wall Street

When we look back at the 1980s, we remember a time when things were apparently all neon colors, leg warmers, and hair so teased and riddled with Aqua Net that it actually caused a global panic as chemicals began eating away at the ozone layer. But that’s not the only thing the 1980s represented to my generation. The 1980s, Reagan’s 1980s, was a decade of excess, where greed drove people to a froth, and drugs, especially cocaine, flowed as freely as water. This was a time in history where a few savvy people on Wall Street ran away with a lot of money, did a lot of drugs, and had a LOT of sex. Looking at it now, nothing has changed, really. 

The Wolf of Wall Street is based on a true story. As insane as it all is, it really is based on a true story, or at least it is from one point of view. This is the story of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) as Jordan himself saw it. It is based on his memoir published in 2007 and the follow-up: Catching the Wolf of Wall Street. When talks began about adapting them into a film, DiCaprio and Warner Bros. won a bidding war for the rights. DiCaprio saw this as an opportunity to work with Martin Scorsese again and sold that idea to the studio. But after Scorsese signed on and began working on a script, they got cold feet. This film, if told accurately to the memoir, would be heavy on sex and drugs, and Warner Bros. weren’t all that keen on the idea of investing a lot of money into a project that they thought would have limited appeal. Scorsese left to make Shutter Island, and Warner Bros. offered the film to Ridley Scott, with Brad Pitt eyed for the lead. Eventually, though, Warner Bros. abandoned the project altogether. 

Then in 2012, an independent company, Red Granite Pictures, stepped in and green-lit the project complete with Scorsese and DiCaprio, and offered them something Warners did not: no content restrictions. They could make this film as crazy, drug-fueled, and as full of debauchery as they wanted. Paramount Pictures was brought in to distribute the film, and it was ready to be filmed. What came out of that agreement is a long, insane movie that shouldn’t work, yet somehow it does. There is not one character, save perhaps Rob Reiner’s Max Belfort, that we should like, yet for the most part, we do like them. They are all bad people, stealing from the gullible and lining their pockets, and we should be rooting for their downfall, yet we don’t. This is an incredible feat of acting and directing to get us to that point. We should despise these people, yet there is a base level to us that still wants to be one of them; to not care about the consequences and live a life of affluence and excess. That base, animalistic level of our existence is what Martin Scorsese is showing us here. When Belfort says, “Everyone wants to be rich,” this is what he is talking about. 

The basic plot of the movie is the fall, or rise (depending on your point of view) of Jordan Belfort. He’s fresh out of college and ready to start his first day on Wall Street, ready to begin buying and selling stocks. As a new broker, though, he is quite naïve and he is quickly enticed by the drug-fueled stockbroker culture as personified by Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey), whose philosophy is that brokers’ sole goal should be to make money for themselves. Not long afterwards, Jordan loses his job following Black Monday, the largest one-day stock market drop in history since the crash in 1929. With the job market depleted, he is forced to take a job at Investor’s Center, a boiler room brokerage firm on Long Island that cold-calls potential investors and sells them on pink sheet penny stocks. These stocks carry a fifty percent commission, and Jordan manages to make a fortune in part due to his aggressive pitching style. 

It isn’t long before he, alongside his neighbor Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill), starts up their own boiler room-style brokerage company. They bring in many of Jordan’s childhood friends, all of whom he trains in the art of the “hard sell.” They specialize in a pump and dump scheme in which misleading, positive statements inflate the price of stocks so that they can sell them at an artificially high price. Once those stocks are sold, the price plummets, leaving the investors holding on to worthless stocks, valued well below what they paid for them. To mask the company, Jordan gives the firm the respectable-sounding name of Stratton Oakmont. 

Business is booming, and everyone is swimming in their ill-gotten money. Jordan begins an affair with model Naomi Lapaglia (Margot Robbie), which leads to a divorce from his first wife, Teresa (Cristin Milioti). He and Naomi marry and have a daughter, and everything seems to be going his way. But the FBI, led by Agent Denham (Kyle Chandler), is closing in after Jordan makes an illegal deal that nets him $22 million in three hours. In desperation, he makes arrangements to utilize Naomi’s aunt, Emma (Joanna Lumley), to front a Swiss bank account and smuggle money out of the country. When Emma dies suddenly, he finds himself in a position where he no longer has access to the cash. On top of that, an attempt to forge a document that will turn over the account to him fails. Some of his fellow brokers are arrested on an unrelated crime and begin hemorrhaging   incriminating information to the feds, too. He’s arrested, loses his family, serves a relatively small sentence in prison, and is released to continue his lavish lifestyle while honest Agent Denham is still riding the subway along with the rest of the working class.

This film is a satire, pure and simple. There is no real comeuppance for Jordan in the end. When he is finally arrested, he is sentenced to three years in prison, serves less than two of them, and then is released. To this date, he still lives a very comfortable life with who knows how many millions of dollars he managed to hold on to. He has moved on to motivational speaking, writing, and hosting a podcast where he breaks down his career and gives financial advice. He has also allegedly been linked to some questionable business ventures in Australia where state government money meant for training and assessment services was never used for such purposes. The Wolf of Wall Street wants us to see that people like this are never really prosecuted, not in the way the average citizen is. This film came out well before the fraud and corruption trials against Donald Trump happened, yet we see parallels in the two. Trump was convicted on 37 counts of business fraud, yet paid no fines, served no time for the crimes, and faced no accountability for his actions. While Jordan did receive punishment for his actions, it still was a slap on the wrist compared to what he did.

This is a long film. At three hours long, it was the longest Martin Scorsese film until he beat it with The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon. The film feels its length, too. This is not meant to be a fleeting film that breezes by. It’s also packed to the hilt with mature content. It holds the Guinness World Record for the most profanity in a single film. It also has a lot of drug use and sex. But the film doesn’t linger on any of this. It’s so heavily saturated with nudity that you get numb from it, losing any sense of shock value. It’s like walking onto a nude beach for the first time; you soon lose interest, and it becomes matter-of-fact. By not focusing on it, it almost becomes unnoticeable. This makes scenes, such as Naomi’s bottomless teasing of Jordan (which is obscured entirely by the edge of the screen), all the more titillating because we aren’t allowed to see what he sees. This film is jam-packed with excess, but it’s most effective when it withholds things from us. 

This was Margot Robbie’s Hollywood debut. It could have easily been a throwaway character, yet she refused to let it go at that. She may not have received Oscar recognition, but she is just as good, if not better, than those who did. Her character, based on Nadine, the real second wife of Jordan, manipulates her way into his life, steals him away from his wife, and stays with him knowing full well what he was getting into. She stays with him because it gives her a lavish lifestyle and comfort and only packs her bags and their daughter when it all starts to fall down around them. The drugs and the adultery weren’t enough to get her to leave him, just the loss of money. 

Leonardo DiCaprio won his only Oscar, to date, for The Revenant. That feels like a consolation prize after not winning it for this film. This is by far the better performance. His portrayal of Jordan Belfort, while nothing like the man in real life, is flamboyant, charismatic, and as full of excess as the film itself. We listen to him giving speeches and we feel motivated to follow him, despite knowing how corrupt and dishonest he is. He, as is virtually everyone else in this film, represents greed and lust and the excesses of the 1980s. Yet all of that is not contained to that decade. The reality is that nothing has really changed. The world of finance is still chugging along at breakneck pace while people get rich off of others’ misfortunes. The world is full of people like Jordan Belfort or the fictional Gordon Gekko who prey on others and don’t pay the price, even when caught red-handed. And the world looks up to people like that, even electing them to high offices to lead us further down that road. Scorsese so accurately tapped into that mentality and imagery that this movie, the one Warner Bros. felt would have too limited a market for them to bankroll, ended up being the biggest box-office success of his entire career, eclipsing such well-regarded films as Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. This is the world we live in, and people wanted to see this film and imagine being a part of it. 

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Picture: Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio, Joey McFarland, and Emma Tilinger Koskoff

Best Director: Martin Scorsese

Best Actor: Leonardo DiCaprio

Best Supporting Actor: Jonah Hill

Best Adapted Screenplay: Terence Winter

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Release Date: December 25, 2013

Running Time: 180 minutes

Rated R

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Matthew McConaughey, Kyle Chandler, Rob Reiner, Jon Favreau, and Jean Dujardin

Directed By: Martin Scorsese