By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 20 seconds ago
Every now and then, I see the mainstream reaction to a successful movie and it makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Perhaps the greatest example of this is the reaction to The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese’s film about the infamous stockbroker named Jordan Belfort. The film is amazing, and it became both a critical and commercial smash hit. Nonetheless, every time I turned around, I saw more people condemning the film. To some degree or another, all of the haters share the same sentiment: that The Wolf of Wall Street effectively glorifies its main character’s illegal, immoral, and downright depraved activities.
Now, that’s an understandable surface-level reading of a movie where a guy parlays manic narcissism into a life of wealth and fame, complete with Margot Robbie in his bed every night. However, what such critics are really complaining about is that Scorsese didn’t give us something with the binary morality and instant consequences of an afterschool special, complete with messages like “drugs are bad, kids!” Instead, the director did something better than pretty much any film since Trainspotting: he revealed the downright intoxicating allure of this hedonistic lifestyle before revealing exactly how much damage it can cause to a man and his family.
Greed Has Never Looked So Good
The Wolf of Wall Street focuses on Jordan Belfort, someone who discovers early on that he is very successful at selling stocks. He opens his own brokerage firm, recruiting his buddies and training them in the art of pumping and dumping. Along the way, he gains fame, acclaim, and more money than God. Unfortunately, this causes him to sink into a life of drug abuse that only gets worse as his criminal activities catch the attention of the FBI. Ultimately, he must decide what to save: the scummy business he built from the ground up, or the brilliant young man who has effectively buried himself in a life of delinquency and decadence.
From the very beginning, The Wolf of Wall Street has been plagued by criticisms that it glorifies all of the excessive and downright dangerous behavior of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort. These critiques typically focus on the ratio of content we are shown. That is, in its oversized three-hour runtime, we see far more of Belfort and other characters living lavish, impossibly expensive lifestyles than we see them paying for their transgressions. Belfort may get arrested at the end, but the film’s haters don’t believe that is enough to offset the rest of the film emphasizing just how well crime can pay.
Why The Haters Are Wrong
It doesn’t help that Belfort, thanks to DiCaprio, is very handsome and charming. Critics of The Wolf of Wall Street believe this helps the film portray this shady stockbroker as someone to look up to. Throw in the fact that the victims are mostly invisible and Belfort’s life is so luxurious, and you are left with a seeming message that crime really does pay. The whole movie feels like an exciting rollercoaster, one that ends with the charismatic criminal serving less than two years in prison. Because of these things, haters consider The Wolf of Wall Street an unabashed and downright dangerous bit of blatant hero worship.
Of course, the harshest critics of The Wolf of Wall Street are wrong about the movie glorifying Jordan Belfort. From the very beginning, Martin Scorsese’s film reminded me of what producer Andrew Macdonald once said about Trainspotting. That film generated a similar moral panic from haters who thought that it was glorifying drugs. Regarding that panic, the producer once told the BBC that, “we were determined to show why people took drugs … you had to show that it was fun and that it was awful.” This caused director Danny Boyle to chime in: “It’s the music and humor that makes people feel it’s glamorising drugs.”
The Modern Anti-Drug PSA
The similar response to The Wolf of Wall Street proves the aphorism from True Detective is, well, true: time really is a flat circle. Obviously, Boyle’s comments explain why so many think Scorsese’s film is glorifying bad behavior: because Belfort, his friends, and their insane actions are often downright hilarious. Many people have trouble separating fiction from reality in their heads, and their own laughter at these onscreen antics makes them feel guilty. They wouldn’t cheer for actual criminals doing terrible things, so they feel weird cheering a fictional sleazebag. Instead of processing how and why they feel this way, these haters simply conclude that the film must be endorsing bad behavior.
The irony here is that The Wolf of Wall Street does condemn that bad behavior, but it does so in a realistic way. We see Jordan Belfort destroy multiple marriages, lose his reputation, and ultimately get tossed in jail; as both a stockbroker and a human being, he fails on almost every level. Why would he go down such a self-destructive path, knowing how risky it could be? Simple: money and power. Belfort is hypnotized by the obscene amounts of money he is making, and his growing love of wealth steadily erodes his judgment. Nothing is more powerful than money, and Scorsese has crafted a tale of power completely and utterly corrupting someone.
You’re Never Higher Than Before The Fall
As with Trainspotting, The Wolf of Wall Street channels the hilarious highs and sobering lows of drug abuse. One of the reasons that anti-drug commercials were always a joke is that they focused entirely on the consequences of abuse, but never on why someone would be tempted in the first place. Scorsese’s film chronicles how Jordan Belfort’s road to hell was paved with every temptation known to man; by the time we see his epic fall from grace, it’s clear that none of this was worth it, despite the drug-fueled ride. That’s ultimately far more effective than a movie that channels its inner South Park to simply say, “Drugs are bad, mm’kay!”
All of this is, of course, part of the magic. The Wolf of Wall Street can be seen as a cautionary tale, one that goes to great lengths to show the dangers of drug abuse and criminal activity. But it can also be seen as a breezy comedy powered by sex, drugs, and stock’n’roll. In reality, the movie is both things: it entertains us with the exploits of very fallible characters while also exploring the permanent consequences of their drunken follies. Ultimately, The Wolf of Wall Street’s concern trolls need to take their own advice and worry about their own addiction: namely, the high they get from preaching to people on the internet!
The Wolf of Wall Street is currently streaming on Hulu.
