The Wolf of Wall Street

Nobody likes rubberneckers, but the dirty secret is … we all do it. Schadenfreude doesn’t exist without reason, and rubbernecking is a part of that. Even as we curse traffic for going 20% of the limit as we pass by a mangled pile of steel and glass that no longer resembles a Toyota, we all gotta look at it in amazement. Part of it is that moment of affirmation of life; it isn’t ME who looks like they got fed face-first into a wood chipper, it isn’t ME with more bones broken than solid. We all feel a pang of guilt or sorrow that whoever it was that got pulled out of the wreckage is in that position, but we’re glad it isn’t us. Wolf Of Wall Street is like rubbernecking, except for that pang of sorrow. It has no interest in the human aspect behind the disaster. It’s only considered in the wreckage, and how awesome the life lived must’ve been before the car slammed into the freeway abutment. It spends three hours — THREE WHOLE HOURS — romanticizing the odious cycle of drugs, sex, and white collar crime and the repugnant human maelstrom at the center of it, Jordan Belfort. It doesn’t give a damn about the tens of thousands of people, hard working people, who got screwed by his schemes and swindles, who lost life savings or even their homes to buy him a yacht. In this movie’s eye, Jordan Belfort is not only a microcosm of the American Dream, but a tragic folk hero. He clawed out from the muck of the middle class, made himself something, something everybody wants, and lost it through hubris. This is, of course, total fiction, but because this movie’s POV is Jordan, and it’s based off his biography, you’ll get no such objective storytelling. Three hours of a loop: finding a new swindle, naked women, drugs, hedonism, search for the next plateau. And this is underscored in the finale of the movie. There is no exploration of the consequences of his downfall. Did he pay the $110 million dollar fine? Were any of his victims made whole? How did the divorce go? What of the firm he founded and his friends still in it? Nope, you get none of that, because this movie wants to hint at how he rebuilds his empire, using his admittedly charismatic nature to train others to be salespeople with no moral compass. Awesome. Is this movie, on a technical level, impressive? Sure. It’s filmed well, and at every moment, captures the essence of Belfort’s whirlwind of hedonism and excess. The visuals are loud and ostentatious, there’s naked women everywhere, and drugs are everywhere. Every moment of this is drenched in the excesses the 80’s pushed away in public but embraced in private. But that indulgence comes at a price, and that is a thoroughly, numbingly toxic story that idolizes a guy who should be kicked down a never-ending flight of stairs. A movie that should’ve exposed him for the two-bit charlatan he is, not (as both Belfort’s and Martin Scorsese’s blindly allegiant followers will say) “allow audiences to make up their own mind”. There is no other side to Jordan Belfort; despite the suits and the yachts and the money, and despite what the movie wants to insist is true, he is exactly what his first boss pegs him to be: lower than pond scum. He is the embodiment of the idea that you can’t put lipstick on a pig. Scorsese, for reasons I can’t fathom, spends three hours trying, and if you have any moral fiber, you’ll find it not romantic or appealing, but difficult to stomach. You’ll remember that lives, tens of thousands of them, were ruined in Jordan Belfort’s wake. When we rubberneck at a car accident, we’re in a moving car. We can drive away. But we should remember that there was a human being, a victim, behind the wheel. Jordan Belfort is the car accident, not the victim. Martin Scorsese would do well to remember that next time he makes one of his visually impressive but morally adrift love letters to crime and criminals.