Review of The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) by Filipeneto — 25 Apr 2018

I confess I had some curiosity and some expectations when I went to see this movie. Scorcese and Di Caprio are two of the biggest names in the current film scene, and both have provided us with some nice films. So I wasn't surprised with the fuss around the movie but, when I saw it, I was very disappointed.

The film is based on an autobiographical book written by Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker who quickly enriched, through financial maneuvers of high risk and zero legality. The book describes not only the business but the life of luxury, drugs and sex that he took, and the way he eventually paid for it. The film, as far as we understand, is quite faithful to the book's account, and the book also makes an apparently true story. The film resembles "Goodfellas" in many ways, but with great differences in which the gangster movie gets the better of it. The main problem of this film lies in three essential points: The first point is the apparent glorification of the fraud and Belfort's dissolute lifestyle. The message passed by the film is "crime pays". It spends more than an hour telling us, in detail, the outrages of Belfort and his team of bastards without any need, shocking some public, who leave the cinema with the feeling that the film passes an ethically wrong message, and society does not need to receive it because it receives enough bad influences.

The second essential point is the absence of a counterpoint to the scenes of excesses shown. Okay, Belfort is a swine, drug addict and corrupt who has gotten rich too fast and too easy. So? Where is the counterpoint to that? He committed crimes, but what are the effects of his crimes? Who lost out on Belfort's crimes? How can audiences truly realize the size of his mistakes? The public never gets these answers because the film gets too lost in the details of Belfort's scandals. The movie makes people think that Belfort never harmed anyone, and that he was just crazy, or smart.

The third negative point is the construction of the characters. They are black-and-white, without the psychological complexity and refinement that we find in "Goodfellas", for example. There's no such thing here. The characters are summed up as junkies, sex offenders, eccentrics, some bored cops and little else. DiCaprio was well enough in his role, but being such an abject role, it's impossible to like and enjoy his performance.

I think Scorcese thought this film as a comedy, but the truth is that it is not funny. The film is morally shocking, not funny. So, it was a bad idea. This film would have been excellent if it had been conceived as a drama and had behind it some moral balance. That was not the case. It is a mad journey through senseless immorality, without notion and without any pretext than easy laughter, and this is quite unpleasant.