The Wolf of Wall Street: Hurawatch

The Wolf of Wall Street: Hurawatch

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“The Wolf of Wall Street” invokes nothing but mixed feelings from its viewers, having many consider it one of the most entertaining films on vile characters. This film, directed by Martin Scorsese, did not only astonish Leonardo DiCaprio, who stars in it, but also left a comparison open to the story of the Roman Emperor Caligula.

Asolutely over the top and shocking, the film, just like the accompanying stockbroker Belfort's memoir, tells the story of his life, and boasts about his success on Wall Street during the 1980s and 90s. Terence Winters scripted the film with no restraint and outlandish appetite for compulsivehe pleasures, as seen by the film's three hour runtime. Numerous clips are said to exist due to Scorsese's regular editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, feeling like the final cut should be four hours long. It is fascinating to see how Scorsese, Winters, and their team presents these capitalist pigs in a way that gives a sense of allure yet repulsion, truly a movie that brings out the most primal instincts within us.

Belfort attempted to conceal his background during his time on Wall Street and did his best to climb the social ladder. McConauhey plays Belfort's mentor at his second attempt, a sleazy oil broker trying to climb to the top.

He transformed himself on Long Island by purchasing a penny stock boiler room and changing its name to “Stratton Oakmont” to gain the trust of working- and middle-class investors. According to Wikipedia, "at its peak, the firm employed over 1000 stock brokers and was involved in stock issues totaling more than $1 billion, including an equity raising for footwear company Steve Madden Ltd." Belfort and his company specialized in selling stocks, which is commonly known as “pump and dump” sales. They inflated the price of a stock that was practically worthless, profiting from its sale before the price plummeted, leaving other investors with huge losses. Belfort was charged in 1998 with money laundering and securities fraud. He served around two years in federal prison and was mandated to repay $110 million to the investors he had defrauded.

Taking cue from gangster films, “Wolf” highlights how Belfort from rags to riches, steeping in infamy (the title is derived from an unflattering magazine profile that attracted federal prosecutors’ attention). This reverse Robin Hood builds himself a team of merry men sourced from all walks of life.

Everyone has a nickname that is Runyon-esque in style together with their given names: ‘Pinhead’ Robbie Feinberg (Brian Sacca), ‘Sea Otter’ Alden Kupferberg (Henry Zebrowski), the hideously toupeed ‘Rugrat’ Nicky Koskoff (P.J. Byrne) Chester Ming (Kenneth Choi) ‘The Depraved Chinaman’ and Brad Bodnick (Jon Bernthal). The latter is a neighborhood lunatic with a DeNiro-like aura who earned the moniker the Quaalude King of Bayside. His dad (Rob Reiner), a volcano in a business suit, works as his office enforcer. He rages about slashes in the budget, office slovenliness, and decorum, complaining but, somehow, pretending to enjoy the cutthroat atmosphere of the trading floor brimming with youthful exuberance.

Belfort’s right-hand man, played by Jonah Hill, is perhaps even more unscrupulous than Belfort himself: a rotund smart aleck with a set of pearly whites who, after just one encounter with the protagonist, promptly ditches his job as a waiter. He not only joins Belfort’s scheme, assists in money laundering, and introduces him to crack, but also becomes a major contributor to Belfort’s already drug-laden system, which was primarily sustained by adrenaline. This came from striking deals and bedding every remotely attractive woman within arms reach. As McConaughey’s character tells Belfort early on, this subset of investing is so scummy that drugs are mandatory: “How the f— else would you do this job?” At one point a broker quips that they are doing “all that coke and all those Quaaludes and guzzling all that booze” in order to “stimulate our freethinking ideas.”

Belfort starts off the story in a marriage he is unhappy in with a good, respectable, yet conservative woman who does not condone his eccentric spending, gaping infidelities, or financial shenanigans. After which, he abruptly ditches her for Australian actress Margot Robbie, who plays trophy wife Naomi LaPaglia, and violently showers her with extravagant gifts that support her lavish lifestyle alongside them.

A few years later, Belfort is purchasing a yacht, living in a mansion that Jay Gatsby would consider tacky. He even helicopters to his parties while blasted out of his mind. Belfort's life comes crashing down when he is confronted by federal prosecutor Patrick Denham (Kyle Chandler). Denham sweats out Belfort by attacking him on his turf, which includes Belfort’s yacht. There, he allows Belfort to brag about himself until he is completely self-sabotaging.

Visualize the final moments of “GoodFellas,” and instead of thirty minutes, stretch it out to three hours. This is the pace and feel of the movie. The pace is intense, with relentless action and no pause for breath: There's stock fraud and money laundering; multiple trips to Switzerland to deposit cash (and let the increasingly intoxicated Belfort hit on his wife’s aunt, played by ‘Absolutely Fabulous’, Joanna Lumley); and rock-and-pop montages featuring ostentatious speed shifts: Slow-motion Quaalude binges. Not forgetting the daringly protracted, dialogue-heavy, improvised “one-act plays” of smaller scenes that precede what feels like off-broadway showcases. Best of these has to be McConaughey’s long scene as Mark Hanna, where Belfort’s mentor belts out anthems to barbarians on perpetual rampage, tribal war song style, showcasing unrivaled primal rhythm cool.

Like many of Scorsese’s films, “Wolf” saves the most gruesome of fate for its subjects by wrapping the male gaze, along with drug use, disregard of women, and promiscuity in a sleek cautionary tale.

With his most spirited act following “Titanic”, DiCaprio portrays Belfort as a Mussolini-esque figure adorning the trading floor, an exuberant jock who rallies his subordinates with praise such as “killers” and “warriors.” Belfort attracts self-destructive, gold-digging women, not only through his brash demeanor and baby face, but mostly by flashing green. Unlike previous works, “Wolf” lacks the mild distancing that Scorsese brought to “GoodFellas” and “Casino,” who managed to sprinkle some semi-empathy into his deadpan narration. Betraying a soft spot for the violent portrayal of familial love in “Casino," which adopted a Kubrick-esque cold indifference of Heaven or Hell, “Wolf” is suffocatingly ever-present, denying viewers any possibility of moral reprieve.

Despite this, it’s incorrect to assume “Wolf” is an amoral film, because it isn’t. The contempt toward the characters drives the cameras to capture their warped, grotesque forms from distorted angles and static wide shots that frame them as caricatures clad in designer clothes confined into cages, with lavish furnishings.

The corpse in the vanity-sized bathtub, adorned in blood from slit wrists, serves Belfort’s narrative best. Belfort is considerate of his people to an extent, which explains how he manages to shift the conversation from an anecdote to: “He got depressed and killed himself three years later.”

He goes on to say without a hitch, “Anyways…” The brokers categorize sex workers based on their value and beauty, labeling them as “blue chips,” “NASDAQ,” and “pink sheets” (or “skanks”); like the firm’s clients, including shoe magnate Steve Madden, whose Belfort deal fully characterizes as “oral rape.” The directorial apex is a Belfort-Azoff Quaalude bender that descends into absurdist whirlpool comic chaos, with Azoff stuffing his face to the point of suffocation, sobbing, freaking out, and collapsing while Belfort suffers episode-crippling paralysis mid-panic phone call about his finances and having to crawl towards his car like a near-roadkill creature, one inch at a time.

These images of reprimand and humiliation, and yes, there are a lot of them because every single one of them is gif-worthy, including Belfort paying a woman to put a lit candle in his bum, coexist with sobering moments that get off on men’s howling and profit-thumping. As a society, we have the tendency to look at both sides, and they urge us to grapple with how to feel about this mixture while compelling us to acknowledge that no one indulges in this behavior, if there is no appeal to indulge in it—wretched or not, wishy-washy or honest.

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Scorsese and Winter never pull their eyes off the larger picture. In essence, the topic of the film is a Wall Street attitude, which is simply a softer version of the gangster attitude seen in Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” ”GoodFellas,” and “Casino” (one could argue that Belfort was among those who drove the Vegas mob out of Vegas). ‘Wolf’ begins with a party Bong-Style on the floor of his firm that resembles a Fellini film, then freeze frames on him literally and figuratively straddling the little guy by Belfort hurling a dwarf at a gigantic Velcro dart. Their surplus abuse rests on the assumption that no one views themselves as ‘little people’, but rather ‘little people’ who have the potential to blossom into the Grand Person who does the tossing. ”Socialism never took root in America,” John Steinbeck wrote, “because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Belfort lashes out again at the prosecutor Denham for what would be called, in Hill language, goody two shoes schtick, and, in a scene towards the tail end of the movie, while commuters are riding the subway to the office, he becomes a target for the sneering comments that become indelibly attached to him.

It appears every single one of Belfort’s firm employees holds a single title: “senior vice-president." Looks like everyone wants to rule the world.

However, the film's vision advances beyond cultural anthropology and the glorification of an antihero figure. When I am asked what i think the film is about, I always give the same answer. It is, in a manner similar to Scorsese films – who beat a copyright addiction in the 80s - obsession: a condition that captures one's emotion and imagination to the extent that it is hard to visualize any other existence apart from the one being lived. Lots of people get high from watching the shenanigans of business magnates, financiers, bankers and almost always male CEOs, and when those men get into a lot of trouble for skirt-suited law bending or breaking, they cheer for them as if they were some outrageous celebrity gangster folk icon. These men, “for all their cruelty and selfishness,” tend to quite frankly, devoid the sensible societal standards that govern the immense set of rules for the sane people. Much to my surprise, this myth glorifying society is euphoric for these addicts, but the shocking part is that this section of the society turns out to be the little powerless people who wish they were the ones dominating the world.

We assist them by taking delight in their success or turning a blind eye to their mistakes, much less restraining their freewill breaking many rules—rules that would be effective if guys like Belfort (and his far more powerful role models) were not allowed the legal bribing of campaign finance of the US legislative authority. After a certain number of decades, we should ask whether the relentless tolerance of supporting addicts like Belfort, actually means that to some degree, his enablers are addicted too—that they (we) are stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle. In the end “Wolf” is not about an obsessive individual, as much as America’s love for capitalist excess opulence and the “He who dies with the most toys wins” capricious attitude that is never fading.

Scorsese and Winter seem hellbent on making comparisons of Belfort’s team to those of Scorsese’s gangster movies, Scorsese mob pictures make addiction the theme, and addiction is the most prominent topic south of the border.

“Wolf of Wall Street” depicts Belfort in a Henry Hill fashion, as if he were a self-destructive addict pawing through the ruins of his life attempting to confess and ask for forgiveness. But like so many addicts, you can hear the buzz in his voice and the adrenaline burning in his veins as he recalls the disasters he narrowly escaped, the lies he told, and the lives he wrecked. He, just like Hill, longs for a life filled with lavish spending and money laundering, wild parties, and big business shakers.

While watching “Wolf,” there will be moments of enlightenment, and you will ask yourself why the actions of these characters are so repulsive yet so entertaining. At that moment, remember what the “it” refers to. In reality, it isn’t just these characters, this setting, and this story. It is the reality we live in. Even though men like Belfort represent us, they enjoy robbing us blind, providing a reality check in Belfort’s case.

They are America, and in some ways America, we should all be fine with their version of America. If that were not the case, we would have seen some type of reform in the 80s, 90s or early 00s that would have made it more difficult for people like Belfort to achieve these levels of wealth, or at the very minimum, swiftly implement mechanisms that severely punish their transgressions. Belfort was never punished in a manner that comes close to the suffering he caused. As federal prosecutors allege, he did not abide by the terms of his restitution agreement in 2003. Now, he is a motivational speaker, and it is clear from reading interviews with him or his memoir, he feels no remorse except for the consequences he faced. It is hilarious when we laugh at the movie, but Belfort and people like him will continue to laugh at us forever.