‘The Wolf of Wall Street” is a 3 hour bacchanal exercise of excess and debauchery. I would say it is a modern cautionary tale in the vein of ‘The Great Gatsby’, but I’m not sure it is entirely a cautionary tale. It seeks the comedy of the wild rise and life of the real life Jordan Belfort. If any story represents the excesses of Wall Street, it is Jordan Belfort’s. Leonardo DiCaprio gives one of his better performances as the legendary Wolf of Wall Street and Martin Scorsese takes him in a decidedly humorous albeit extreme direction.
Jordan Belfort was a middle class slick talker who lands an entry level job at a brokerage in 1987. There, under the hilarious mentorship of Mark Hanna (a far too brief role for Matthew McConaughey), Jordan learns the business of selling stocks. Unfortunately, Black Monday happens and Jordan, along with a large number of his peers find themselves on the street. Down and out, Jordan lowers himself to apply for work at a penny stock brokerage in Long Island. When Jordan realizes that he will earn a 50% commission on worthless junk stocks as opposed to 1% on more ‘legitimate’ investments, a whole new world opens to him. His new found peers marvel at his ability to sell massive amounts of these stocks. He parlays his instant success into starting his own brokerage; the professional sounding Stratton Oakmont (a Lion on the logo and everything). He rounds up a bunch of his neighborhood friends, who were mainly skilled at selling weed, to be his men in the sales trenches.
Donnie Azzoff (Jonah Hill), the quirky neighbor instantly becomes Jordan’s beta male side kick once he learns how much Jordan makes. Other than McConaughey’s character, the role of Jonah Hill’s Azzof provides the majority of the comic relief in the movie. He revels in Jordan’s success almost as much as Jordan does. Through questionable business practices, Stratton Oakmont becomes a great success and the money starts rolling in in quantities greater than they ever imagined. With the great success, the life of great excess starts. Drugs, sex, and parties commence in an ever increasing cycle. All their addictive personalities cause them to have a no limit lifestyle of debauchery and excess. A guy who used to take the bus to Wall Street becomes an entrepreneur who takes a helicopter to and from work. Wives are left for trophy wives.
Even though it’s immensely funny, it almost becomes ponderous over the course of 3 hours how each hedonistic event tops the previous. Of course, with this much success attention is attracted. Both the FBI and the media start to dig into his mega success as they rightfully believe that there must be something shady to achieve this much success. Ironically, the Forbes hatchet article on his mega success attracts a swarm of top end stock brokers who now want to work for him. This launches him even further into the stratosphere. As with all mega excess, it can only burn this bright before things start to collapse.
I tend to be libertarian and capitalistic in my belief system, but I felt this challenged as we see how much wealth is created without creating anything. Basically, a stockbroker just moves money from one stock to another and makes money each time it happens. They create absolutely nothing, yet gain great wealth from that. To make it worse, Scorsese delights in showing the total contempt these salesman have for their clients. They milk money from people who can’t afford it and laugh at the con they are pulling on them. Despite the laughter Scorsese inserts, one feels unclean at watching these types of smarmy people bilk so many people out of their savings.
‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ is a fun, almost X-rated ride, about capitalistic excess. It was equally fun and disturbing to see just what money can buy in terms of an excess lifestyle. It’s a little unsettling seeing that his eventual karmic punishment did not really strike me as something that would dissuade someone from that life if that is a direction they chose. It was a wild ride with only a mild punishment and a life on the other side. Scorsese and DiCaprio rarely do wrong together and it was fun to see them turn out this epic sized, yet humorously american tale. Definitely a high point in both their careers. If you can take the X-rated debauchery, I highly
recommend this film.
I give this film ***1/2 stars
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