The Wolf of Wall Street

There's a little thing people like to do when celebrities are caught out indulging in the hedonism their ridiculous paychecks allow them to: they like to be disgusted. Appalled. Ashamed. "Oh, how horrendous," they say. "I would never do that." Bullshit. Life has yet to afford them the chance. Few directors understand this the way Martin Scorsese does. Since the beginning of his career, he's openly displayed his fascinated repulsion for society's maladjusted egomaniacs in such beautifully crafted ways that often comes the time when the line between condoning and condemning is blurred. That's no accident, however. After all, Travis Bickle, Henry Hill, Rupert Pupkin and now Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) are people, just like us. They were children, they grew up, they had dreams, aspirations and the best intentions. And we're only three or four mistakes away from being them. In the wrong hands, The Wolf of Wall Street could have easily been a dopey, heavy-handed anti-capitalism flick. Thankfully, it's smart enough to not be anti-anything. If anything, it's anti-addiction to things that are addictive, but even that's not really the case. It's simply about the nature of people, specifically those that seize on opportunity and allow it to consume them. As hard as it may be to hear, Jordan Belfort, the coke-sniffing, midget-tossing, two-timing, wife-bashing, money-stealing, no-good, dirty lying rat, isn't a monster. He's a person, and he used to be just like you. And you can be just like him. All you've got to do is listen closely.

For as long as Jordan Belfort can remember, he always wanted to be a rich man. And, like the movies say, nowhere gets you richer or poorer faster than Wall Street. Straight-laced as you can be, at the age of 24 he accepts a job as a "connector", one of hundreds of foul-mouthed fast-talkers on a phone trying to put people with money through to the higher-ups. After a lunch with one of his superiors, Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey), in which he does a tribal chant with his chest, breaks down stockbroking as nothing more than smoke and mirrors, and encourages decadence as the only way to survive in this environment, he starts working his way through the business. Until Black Monday. With the stock market in shambles, and nowhere else to take his skill of talking quick to the impressionable, Jordan takes a job selling penny stocks (common shares of small public companies that trade low) at a company that offers a 50% commission for every sale. His Wall Street training nets him a small fortune in no time, and after a chance chat with his neighbour Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill), the two open their own firm. Still utilising the penny stocks, but training a few of their drug dealer friends in the subtle art of smooth talk, in no time Jordan's raised his pump and dump company (artificially inflating owned stock through persuasive language to sell at a high price and "dump" the investor after selling) to a few-hundred-staff-strong office space in Long Island, with a Forbes article praising and pissing on his name and an FBI agent breathing down his neck. But like you give a shit about any of this. As the ads show, the business is just a means to an end. An end filled with parties, drugs, booze, sex and a yacht with extensions to fit the helicopter on.

There's a scene in the second half of The Wolf of Wall Street where things have gone belly-up for Belfort. Among the FBI having him in a pinch, his wife Naomi Lapaglia (Margot Robbie), wants a divorce. Jordan, smacked out on drugs because it's whatever the fuck o'clock, declares she'll never take his kids and storms away to get his daughter. Naomi follows and he punches her square, hard and fast in the stomach. It's a wretched act, made all the worse by his following antics in the car, backing straight into their brick fence and somehow not hurting his child. But minutes later, he has us charmed again and laughing at the witty exchange between him and Donny. Why? Because he's that good. To go back to the aforementioned luncheon with Mark Hanna, it's in this moment Jordan learns his greatest skill. It's not about making money for yourself and the clients, it's just about moving money from them to you. "Nobody knows if the stock is gonna go up, down, sideways or in fucking circles. Least of all stockbrokers. It's all a fugazi." See, consider the turn of events in The Wolf of Wall Street. It seems nothing really happened. Belfort made a lot of money, he did a lot of crazy, fucked-up shit and then it all inevitably came crashing down on his head. So why are we so captivated? Because we were under the spell of his sales pitch. We can't pretend we followed the story. Even Belfort acknowledges we weren't paying attention, cancelling a monologue filled with technical gibberish halfway through with a, "Fuck it. The point is: Was it illegal? Abso-fuckin-lutely." Following the story isn't his intention. The jargon is just hoodoo. We get the broad strokes and the buzz words and that's what matters to his sales pitch. We're being teased with how close we are to being him and, even if that horrifies us, we're hooked.

The point I'm trying to make is that a big part of Jordan being able to sell us his story is his ability to tell us his story. Everything is so lavish and over the top and in excess and straight-up fucking unbelievable because it's his story and he wants you to be addicted to it. Enchanted. Of course it didn't fucking happen like this. But who cares? Doesn't he tell it well? Isn't this pretty fucking cool? When he's getting hunted by the FBI, it has to be the best agent in the field: the Straight A's Go Fuck Yourself Top Cop Motherfucker who can't be bought, preserving justice until it kills him. Because he's Jordan Fucking Belfort. He almost gets to fuck his wife's elderly aunt, but chooses not to. Because he can fuck anyone. Because he's Jordan Fucking Belfort. He has telepathic conversations with crazy successful Swiss bankers. Because crazy successful Swiss bankers are on the same wavelength as Jordan Fucking Belfort. Even when he punches his wife, it's because she's trying to take something from him: Jordan Fucking Belfort. Scenes go on for way longer than they should on irrelevant topics because it's his story. His team spends five minutes discussing the business ethics surrounding throwing a midget across the room because Belfort thinks it's fucking hilarious and you should too. There's a twenty minute scene in which he tries to get from a country club back home so he can get Donny off of a wire-tapped phone whilst so out of his mind on illegal sleeping pills that he can barely move his limbs, let alone walk (Cerebral-Palsied, as he so delicately puts it), because Belfort thinks that shit is so fuckin' crazy cool and you should too. Even if he can't always escape the truth, no better example than in his following drugged-out fight scene with the equally drugged-out Donnie, choking each other with the phone cord and having us in stitches until one masterfully heartbreaking shot shows Jordan's infant daughter stepping into the kitchen and seeing just the sort of person her father is, the truth ultimately becomes an afterthought. An afterthought to the gestalt built from the "Aw fuck man, ya shoulda been there" attitude, the image, the sales pitch. Keep listening. You can be just like me.

When The Wolf of Wall Street began with a shot of Leonardo DiCaprio snorting cocaine out of a stripper's asshole, I got mentally prepared to watch a film in which I was not going to sympathise with the characters. How surprising then, that Scorsese dares me to do just that. About halfway through the film, Jordan's invited the Batman of FBI agents, Patrick Denham (Kyle Chandler) onto his boat and attempts to bribe him. When he fails to do so, he taunts the agent as he leaves by saying, "Good luck on that subway ride home to your miserable ugly fuckin' wives." One of the film's final scenes is of Denham doing just that. Belfort is in jail, his company has been completely shut down and Pat's the hero. But there's a slight twinge in his eye as he looks around the car, at all the people either on their way home from work or on their way to work, some for the second time that day, some not working at all. It was people like these that Jordan made rich alongside himself. He was never a leader in Wall Street. He was forever the underdog, built from nothing. And there's a prior scene in the film in which he's telling his entire staff his intent to give in and surrender to the FBI. He reminisces on some of his most valued members of staff and the horrible, dire situations he found them in and pulled them out of because he had the means and they had the initiative. You know, the initiative to steal money from the rich to get richer. No matter which way you look at it, his activities were illegal and he did a lot of really shitty things. But is it possible, even just a shred, that he's a hero? The final scene of the film puts the period on Jordan Belfort's career. He's a motivational speaker on self-sufficiency and personal financial growth. But nothing's changed. As he asks each person to sell to him his own pen to teach them about the power of persuasive language, the same way he did when starting his company, he's helping people who can't help themselves. Think of it what you will. But definitely go and see The Wolf of Wall Street. Some people have complained about its length, but I could have happily had another hour or more of this. It's a movie that justifies its length. It's not a focus-group business decision based on what the masses expect these days, it simply goes until the very engaging story is over. You may notice it occasionally or get a bit bored once or twice, but for the most part you'll just enjoy watching fine actors play interesting characters under masterful direction. A guy like Martin Scorsese, who you could have said was at the top of his game years ago, still is, because he still gives a fuck about the story, the craft and you.