Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, which is still playing in theaters everywhere, has become an item of controversy among critics, on both sides of the aisle. The Left argues that the film glorifies Wall Street corruption, while the Right decries the movie for painting wealth in a negative light.
But is the movie a political statement for either side?
If you haven’t seen the film yet, the actual story doesn’t have much to spoil. Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) attained his wealth by selling junk penny stocks to the wealthy elite and conducting initial public offerings, or IPOs, on small private companies that artificially pumped up their stock prices. He also laundered his money in Switzerland and committed securities and investment fraud. He went to prison for it all, but not before reveling in the fruits of his acquisitions, which the film shows off in spades. As absurd and unreal as the debauched opulent revelry is, Wolf reportedly documented Belfort’s career and life extremely accurately.
The problem, according to many critics, is that through execution, the film glorifies that bad behavior and doesn’t present a strong enough moral indictment of Belfort and Wall Street in general. Wolf allegedly makes a grand spectacle out of his career and celebrates his comeuppance too much, with the truly harmful nature of his crimes as an afterthought. His obvious villainy apparently isn’t spoon-fed enough.
Those critics are wrong.
The same ridiculous logic behind complaints about the torture in Zero Dark Thirty has led these critics to a dreadfully mistaken conclusion about Wolf — but that is not to say that this film is a condemnation of capitalism either. The film has a message — a surprisingly conservative one at that — but not the political kind.
The reckless ambitions of man uninhibited by morality corrupt the heart and engender the downfall of the very institutions that made our country so prosperous. Wall Street’s dubious ethics enabled Belfort, but Belfort is the bad guy.
In the beginning, we are told that the game is not one of wealth creation, but one of wealth redistribution, and that the invisible hand of the market is so invisible it might as well not exist. Or at least, it doesn’t apply here. Keep your gullible clients rich on paper by continuously recommending new stocks to reinvest in and you take home real commission pay. So long as the bubbles grow — i.e. clients don’t sell — you, the broker, have nothing to worry about.
While indeed progressives might salivate at the prospect of painting capitalism with a criminal brush, the truth is that these shady dealings fall far outside the moral boundaries of the system, or at least they should. Themes of piggish greed, excess of wealth, crime begetting itself, and the permeation of parasitic upper-class entitlement all resonate deep within its narrative. And the setting of Wall Street, as illustrated in the film, is an institutionalized fantasy world in and around itself, with barely a tangible connection to reality. None of that, however, is Wolf’s focus, and in critiquing Wall Street, it is not automatically critiquing the free market.
In fact, Wolf trusts that viewers already understand that basic difference. The film operates as a dark comedy but follows in the Scorsese tradition of also being its own gangster movie about the makings of a monster. Wolf revels in Belfort and Donnie Azoff’s (Jonah Hill) juvenile behavior and illustrates all the sin money buys as it probably is — glamorous fun. They reap their earnings by driving fancy cars, partying on yachts, bedding scores of prostitutes and nearly killing themselves with drugs.
Yet while the audience intimately shares the experience of what the film is determined to make look like a rollicking great time, Wolf is simultaneously driving a wedge between the audience and Belfort, as he grows into an increasingly worse human being — to the point where it’s no longer funny.
The Wolf of Wall Street is neither a celebration, nor a cry for socialization, of great personal wealth. It is a cautionary tale — a warning against succumbing to the temptations of moral wrongdoing in the name of attaining the American Dream; temptations born out of the same avarice that fueled Belfort’s financial conquest. In doing so, it is also an honest acknowledgment that we are all like him in more ways than we’d probably admit.
But don’t take my word for it. See the film for yourself and you might appreciate what it has to say. It’s, without hyperbole, one of the best films of 2013.
