The Wolf of Wall Street stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan
Belfort, a Long Island stock broker who served 3 years in prison for his
part in defrauding investors in a securities scam in the 1990s. The Wolf of Wall Street is nominated for five Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Actor (DiCaprio), Best Supporting Actor (Jonah Hill), Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director (Martin Scorsese). This is DiCaprio's fourth acting Oscar nomination. This is Scorsese's ninth nomination. He won the Oscar for his direction of the 2006 movie The Departed, which was another all-star ensemble cast including DiCaprio. This would be the fifth time Scorsese and DiCaprio have teamed up for a blockbuster hit.
Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio) began working on Wall Street when he was 22 years old.
His first day with a broker's license was tragically October 19, 1987,
also known as Black Monday, when the world's stocks plummeted and
Belfort lost his job. Desperate for work, he finds success for a firm
called Investor Center. With his newly acquired wealth and a few of his
friends, he leases out an empty garage and starts his own firm,
Stratton-Oakmont. Their continued success gains the attention of the
financial world and the FBI. Forbes magazine dubbed Belfort as the
"Wolf of Wall Street". His goal was to make more money than he and his
friends knew what to do with. Throwing lavish parties and spending
ridiculous amounts of money, not only were Belfort's trading practices
shady and illegal, so were his methods of hiding his money from the
federal government. His world of family, friends, parties and drugs
eventually come crashing down around him.
The preview for The Wolf of Wall Street just barely gives you a glimpse into the seedy world of finance that is a breeding ground for complete and utter debauchery and total lack of self-control or inhibition. On Belfort's first day on Wall Street, he is taken to lunch by senior partner Mark Hannah (Matthew McConaughey) who snorts cocaine, drinks martinis and talks about sexual gratification openly with Belfort. Belfort innocently declines the drugs and booze and naively suggests that making money for their clients in the process of making money for themselves would be a good thing. Hannah quickly shuts down that idea and says it's only about making themselves rich. Within months, Belfort is in a strip club, doing enough daily drugs to sedate Manhattan, and drinking excessively. He is making so much money that he snorts a line of cocaine off his desk at work with a hundred dollar bill, crumples the bill and tosses it in a waste basket full of them. He comments that he made forty-nine million dollars last year and that upset him because he was three million shy of a million a week. He is constantly with different women, cheating on both of his wives. He is constantly cheating investors out of their money and training his staff to do the same. This film is graphic and disturbing. I laugh briefly but am quickly nauseated to remember that this actually happened, and probably still happens in the world of finance among those who care for nothing than to have more money than they know what to do with. I don't care to watch it again and it will not be making it into my personal collection.
So why the 4.0 star rating? Because that's exactly what the movie aimed to do. It isn't glorifying this behavior. It's bringing it into the spotlight. It shows how dark and ugly riches can make people. And co-star Johah Hill understood that fully when he took on the role of Belfort's co-founder and best friend Donnie Azoff. "It was understood going in that there was no holding back. Every day we were doing something crazy, and it's fun and exciting working for Scorsese, and then when I'd be driving home at the end of the day, I'd feel a wave of guilt come over me because I treated people so badly that day." And Hill was just playing a role. Playing a character. Except these aren't just fictional characters in someone's mind like a psychopath in the mind of Stephen King. These people actually exist and they actually don't have those moments of guilt or remorse for the things they've done or to whom they were done. While the FBI was investigating Belfort and his company, none of his co-workers ratted on anyone, giving the FBI no information at all that could help with their investigation. They presented Belfort with enough evidence that suggested he could go to prison for 20 years to life if he refused to cooperate. In exchange, he would only serve 4 years. He agrees to wear a wire, but slides a note to Azoff alerting him to the fact they were being recorded. The FBI recovers the note and arrests Belfort with no more deals. However, once he tells them everything he knows, his sentence is reduced to a mere 3 years in a facility where he is seen playing tennis daily. Belfort went on to write a best-selling novel about his experience about which this movie was written, he had a guest appearance in the movie, and is currently giving salesmanship seminars. It's disturbing that our financial and our justice system allow and encourage this type of behavior while the hardest working people can barely get by.
Matthew McConaughey, Jonah Hill and Leonardo DiCaprio give amazing performances and effectively portray the slimiest dirt bags you could possibly imagine. To me, however, it's just sad that even in bringing about such evil to light, the performances and film themselves are rewarded with nominations for the best of the year. Maybe I'm just getting too old and maybe I'm just a prude, but this seems a bit like showing criminals on the news. Yes, it gets ratings, but it also gets them what they want: their moment of fame. In fact, the story of criminality continues for the real Jordan Belfort. He was paid $1.045 million dollars for the rights to his book. According to the government, only $21,000 of that went to repay his victims. In 2003, he was ordered to repay $110.4 million dollars to his victims. He has only paid back $11.6 million. Though it doesn't glorify the behaviors, The Wolf of Wall Street does still show that you can cheat people and make yourself filthy rich, if you don't mind the filthy part. And, even if you get caught, if you have enough money to start with, you'll still end up much better off than most people. So, I reluctantly give 4.0 stars to this disturbingly graphic look into the world of Wall Street. So, what movie will be on my mind next? We shall see.
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