On the 29th of December, Jordan Belfort posted a status update to his Facebook page. “Ahh, the haters!” he said, presumably referring to all the critics of the film of the story of his life, The Wolf of Wall Street. “If they only knew how much they were serving my cause they would quickly shut the *&^% up.”
How much Belfort is being served by Wolf has become a hot button topic for critics, film bloggers and Matt Yglesias (who speciously claimed that this period piece whitewashes Wall Street’s contemporary problems). It’s been said that Wolf glorifies Belfort, is enamoured with his excess and permissive of his predatory behaviour. That discussion hasn’t been helped by conflicting messages from the Wolf camp – DiCaprio talks of indicting Belfort’s actions then turns around and endorses him; Scorsese calls Belfort “the devil [who] comes with a smile” and then gives him a cameo in which he talks himself up.
To take the movie as it presents itself, though, Wolf is a product of anger and disbelief at the conditions that allow a person like Belfort the opportunities to seize wealth and influence. Belfort is to Wall Street what Henry Hill, of Scorsese's similar Goodfellas, is to organised crime – a starry-eyed product of an unchecked system of greed, violence and extreme egotism. Belfort and Hill are both small fish in a massive ocean, but they’re drunk on the power and respect they're allowed.
However, Belfort’s power and respect are “legitimate”. Not in the sense that what Belfort did was legal – in a memorable monologue about the Steve Madden public offering, he straight-up admits to breaking the law. The difference is that society was, and still is, fine with his methods. Belfort learns to hunt in LF Rothschild, a firm with a hundred-year pedigree; Forbes calls him a crook, and a horde of young white men clamour at his door for a job; he's indicted for securities fraud to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, and laughs as he serves 22 months in a low-security prison. For Belfort and his cronies, Wolf says, Stratton Oakmont was a decade-long binge with jack-all hangover.
Wolf’s greatest success is in its packaging, though. Over the course of 45 years, Scorsese has consistently shown that he’s a master of the aesthetic vocabularies we use when talking about different kinds of violence. The visual language of Wolf is a world away from the stark black and white sequences of domestic abuse in Raging Bull or the choppy street brawling in Mean Streets; it’s all first-person narration, million-dollar set design, snappy editing, bright lighting and striking contrasts. Scorsese puts the language of MTV Cribs to work because that’s the language we use when we talk about the wealth and excess of those who've made their millions with casual disregard for the violence they've inflicted.
Wolf is an attractive film, yes. It’s stylish and funny and moves at a crisp pace. That’s because it needs to. Scorsese wants to change how we talk about Wall Street, how we give legitimacy to reckless, predatory financial practices by only caring about the cash-money at the end. He wants you to be angry at Belfort, at Stratton Oakmont, at the whole damn system. Will some people miss the indictment, only see a good time? Sure. But it’s not because Wolf is endorsing Belfort, serving him. It’s because we’ve built a society that does that already.
