Legendary film Director Martin Scorsese tells the ‘Caligula’ meets ‘Wall Street’ true story of a New York stock broker who refuses to cooperate with FBI investigations of fraud in Wall Street.
Depicting the memoirs of Jordan Belfort, from losing his job on his first day due to Black Monday, selling penny shares to make ends meet to building his own mini empire, The Wolf of Wall Street depicts a modern day Babylon, where everything and everyone goes up in smoke, except the people who lit the fuse.
Like Henry Hill in Goodfellas who ‘All my life I wanted to be a Gangster’, Jordan Belfort always wanted to be rich ‘Their money was better off in my pockets. I knew how to spend it better’. He wasn’t some innocent who started life at Wall Street and got corrupted along the way; he was greedy from the beginning, got greedier, got rich and got caught.
Leonardo DiCaprio is outstanding as Jordan Belfort. The energy level he maintains throughout this three hour epic is astonishing. But there’s more to DiCaprio’s performance than just adrenaline busting speeches and drug fuelled sex rampages, there’s a nuance there too. Belfort is a despicable human being; he made his living destroying the lives of innocent people to the tune of $200 million. But, somehow, thanks to DiCaprio’s performance there are brief (very brief) moments when you are impressed by Belfort. An FBI Agent makes the point that most people he has taken down in the financial world were born with a silver spoon in their mouths. Belfort started his Stratton Oakmont empire from scratch.
The supporting cast are just as good and in some scenes even better. Matthew McConaughey’s small turn at the beginning of the movie as Mark Hanna still sticks in the mind even at the end of this marathon movie. Margot Robbie is terrific as Naomi Lapaglia, the model wife who turns a blind eye to the madness around her. There are nice little shows from Jean Dujardin, as the sleazy Swiss banker (is there any other kind?), to the delectable Joanna Lumley as Aunt Emma, who manages to seduce Belfort.
The stand out support comes from Jonah Hill as Donnie Azoff, Jordan Belfort’s partner in crime. His, is very nearly a show stopping performance, matching DiCaprio’s energy levels when needing to, whilst bringing an intangible element to the character, which must have been very difficult portraying a cousin marrying, public masturbating, and possibly closet homosexual with fluorescent white teeth.
It is strange people have criticised the film for not showing the characters getting their comeuppance or them showing the least amount of sympathy for the lives their ruined. But as we’ve seen in here in the UK, we all know perfectly well none of the people who were involved in the collapse of the economy were ever held to account or even any prosecutions made. At least Belfort was sentenced for the 36 months in the film, all that happened to Fred Goodwin was that he was stripped of his Knighthood, and this was the guy who brought down the Royal Bank of Scotland; Belfort just dealt dodgy penny shares.
Some critics have said this film doesn’t have a moral core, of course it doesn’t. It’s telling an immoral story about a group of immoral people. If you want a Knight in shining armour movie where there are goodies and baddies go watch a Disney cartoon. If you need someone in the film to explain to you that a wife-cheating, wife-beating, drug addict who makes his money from ruining other people’s lives is a bad person then you really have to get yourself a new moral compass.
What’s truly scary about this film is that these were small time brokers trying to emulate the ‘Masters of the Universe’ who brought down the global economy. It’s less a study of global finances more an insight into what motivates the kind of people who operate in that world. And if that’s how the small time brokers behaved God knows what the heads of Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley got up to.
For a film that’s 3 hours long there is an argument that some time should of been spent showing the effects Belfort’s actions had on his victims. But, the Global Economy collapsed in 2008 and we are still living with the fall out today, we know what the effects were. This film is not about those it affected and the lives it ruined, it’s about the men who created the fall out and how they walked away from it relatively unscathed.
Comparisons are being made to Scorsese’s previous work such as Goodfellas and Casino, which is understandable. I don’t think The Wolf of Wall Street quite reaches the dizzying heights of Goodfellas as the stakes aren’t stacked quite high enough. It’s impressive after all the substance abuse these men went through that they’re still alive, but their lives were never under threat from anybody else. As result the film doesn’t have the same levels of tension running through it, unlike Goodfellas, where anyone could be killed off at any time and for something as simple as saying someone was funny.
Like Goodfellas this film hangs entirely on whether you engage with the main character. This is quite a big risk for the film makers. In Goodfellas , Harry Hill never really got his hands dirty, this gave the audience enough justification to allow themselves to be seduced by his criminal world. Belfort on the other was at the centre of everything and got his hands so dirty he’s probably still trying to clean them today. As such, it’s understandable why some audiences may not want to go on this three hour odyssey of debauchery.
This is a film about moral bankruptcy and the culture and people it breads.
These people are still out there, there are thousands of Jordan Belforts in financial capitals all over the world and no-one is doing anything because like Mark Hanna says ‘none of it is real’. Brokers like Jordan Belfort keep getting people to invest more and more of their money into ever more fanciful schemes, whilst the whole system gets more and more inflated with non-existent money until the whole system implodes in on itself, with the likes of Jordan Belfort walking away with sack full of cash.
The Wolves are still out there.
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