film review: the wolf of wall st
‘Cocaine, testosterone and body fluids’ – Jordan Belfort
Oddly enough I was forcefully reminded of The Great Gatsby when I watched The Wolf of Wall Street. Not because the leading man of both of those films is Leonardo Dicaprio, but because they are both a study of hedonism and excess. There have been several films that capture this message so eloquently: when humans possess everything they could possibly desire they will not self actualise and become content. They will want more more more. It’s an observation made by the Maquis de Sade in the 1700s and seems to be timeless.
In this film, based on the memoir of Jordan Belfort, Leonardo Dicaprio plays Belfort, a man who idolises Gordon Gecko (the lead character in Wall Street – another excellent example of rampant consumerism and the innate nature of greed). Belfort started his own minuscule broker’s firm in Queens before going on to become Wall Street royalty and defraud his clients of over 200 million dollars.
This film is a black comedy that made me laugh out loud then immediately feel dirty for finding the antics on screen at all amusing (kind of like how I laughed in Pulp Fiction – there are very few directors that can depict a man being shot in the face as hysterically funny). Though the excesses are portrayed in a darkly comedic manner the stark reality is these people are making ‘more money than they knew what to do with’ and as a result behaving like Gods. Drunk, skeezy, lecherous, stoned Gods.
One particular scene depicted a man receiving oral sex in a glass elevator while hundreds of people, mostly men, watched and applauded. Another less graphic but even more disturbing scene was during the first quarter of the film: Belfort is rhapsodising on the glories and ‘nobility’ of vast amounts of wealth to his employees and declares that he will give a young female employee 20 thousand dollars to let him shave her head. She is visibly shaking and trying yet failing to put on a brave face. This either goes unnoticed or is not worthy of caring about by Belfort and the hundreds of people watching. It was at that point that I considered walking out of the film – despite a movie being well made and acted is not necessarily enough to keep in the theatre. You have to ask yourself ‘do I really need to see this?’ Obviously I decided to stay – one of the amazing functions a film can perform is to push your boundaries.
The treatment of women in this film is absolutely appalling as one might expect. The lens in which Belfort viewed the world was commodification; was this person/object of any value and how might I go about acquiring them/it? While Belfort talked about ‘liking’ (‘we actually had stuff in common!’) the blonde bombshell (Margot Robbie, played by the Australian actress Naomi Lapaglia), he married her because of what she represented to him. Margot possesses beauty befitting a man of obscene wealth. Unlike the more homely woman he was originally married to and cast aside as he started to accumulate his fortune.
At first I thought this film was mostly satire, (embellishment leads to great stories), and yet it would seem an almost entirely faithful account of the life of this man. This was a thought that occurred to me while I snorted with laughter watching Belfort imbibe pharmaceutical goodies only to transform into a drooling, palsyesque man resembling a beached whale. It was this combination of humour and depravity that made this film work on so many levels – it made several uncomfortable observations about human nature (or perhaps human habit) and gave people and insiders account of Wall Street.
I found this film thought provoking and hilarious but I did feel kind of dirty afterwards.
