Review of The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) by Crunchygranola — 01 Jan 2014

The Wolf of Wall Street is very long, very loud, full of brazen immoral behavior, repellent characters, completely over-the-top, and a brilliant black comedy.

Reading through the reviews by professional critics and users it appears that except for my conclusion in that lead-in sentence, everyone agrees about what is on the screen whether they give it high ratings, mixed ratings or low ratings. It is not a case of one person seeing one thing and another seeing something different.

The immoral (not amoral) life of Jordan Belfort requires this treatment the movie is what he was: loud, brazenly immoral, repellent, completely over-the-top and a brilliant con man. A more "restrained" treatment could not have done it justice.

Are you offended by what you see in this movie? Good! It is offensive, but that is the point. You need to see how offensive Belfort and his whole operation was/is. This bad, bad behavior is being held up for ridicule. Laughing at it is the only way viewing it could be tolerable. He does not deserve to be treated as a serious man.

But there is a serious sub-text to this movie. It is an indictment of Wall Street as a whole. The film makes this clear, as Belfort spends one day in a "legitimate" Wall Street firm on 1987's Black Monday, and is exposed to the immoral operation of the "best" firms: the fact that all brokers are essentially conmen fleecing their clients. His genius is to take what he sees and break it free from its shackles of faux respectability, starting with his initial staffing hiring buddies who are small time drug dealers. He is not debasing Wall Street, he is embodying it in its purest form.

And the end of movie makes a very cogent point: how modern society treats the parasites of Wall Street. We see the FBI agent who could have been a broker, and rich, if he had chosen to be a Wall Street conman riding on the subway home. We see Belfort's punishment: 22 months in a country-club prison, and a fine of only part of his vast ill-gotten wealth, where a poor man guilty of 1% of his crimes would have spent 20 years of hard time. And we see the audience of Belfort's "sales" seminars looking hungrily at him, desperately wanting to be able to do what he did.

Having seen the miscreants on Wall Street that crashed the economy at the cost of trillions of dollars to the nation in 1987, walk scott-free, not a single indictment much less a conviction, and not even miss one of their bonuses, this is a very timely movie.

DiCaprio is a necessity in the lead role. It does not draw on his full capabilities, and he carries the role easily, but only a top-flight charismatic actor could portray Belfort and bring the audience along with his utterly self-centered, corrupt, destructive ride.

This movie forms a trilogy with two of Scorsese's other films: Goodfellas (one of the best films ever made) and Casino. They all chronicle the rise and fall of the hustler.

The only reason I give this a 9 instead of a 10, is that then I have no where to go with rating Marty's other great films, several of which (like Goodfellas) are among the best movies ever made.