The Wolf of Wall Street

Needless to say, The Wolf of Wall Street, directed by Martin Scorsese, generated an uproar of critiques, bad reviews, and moral questioning. I picked and sorted through these numerous negative remarks until I found an extremely harsh and opinionated yet actually intelligible argument to counter. Lawrence Toppman’s thesis to his argument is “Martin Scorsese can make a three-hour movie without one fresh perspective or compelling character from end to end. The proof, for three agonizing hours, can be found in “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

Toppman says there is no compelling character in this movie. Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) is portrayed as a very intelligent and driven young man at the beginning of his life. He starts from nothing and gets rich fast. This gives the impression of a protagonist, but there is a shift in character. The main plot quickly develops into an interior struggle as he battles with any addiction humanely possible (drugs, success, money, sex, himself, and more drugs). Throughout the film, Jordan’s character transformation from protagonist to monster is obvious, and although the monstrous man Belfort becomes is no longer compelling, it does the opposite of degrade the quality of the movie. In fact, the man to monster plot has proven very successful and is a main piece to critically acclaimed series “Breaking Bad” (the monster of Walter White).

Lawrence Toppman’s review briefly touches on what Scorsese is trying to accomplish in the movie. He suggests that maybe he wants the viewers to “laugh at this addled, heartless creep” but that he also “attempts to make [viewers] care about [Belfort]”. In tems of the former, a lot of things are just for comedic effect, such as the scene with Maconohay’s character snorting coke, pounding his chest, humming, and teaching Belfort about the financial importance of masturbation and cocaine. However, for the latter argument, think the only time Scorsese wanted viewers to like Belfort was in the beginning of the movie when he was still an honest man. The other two and a half hours of the movie were completely devoted to the tragedy of a man whose success completely tainted his character.

The critique also questions the necessity of the over the top and frequent explicit content beyond a comedic device. To be fair, the film is quite racy. The Wolf of Wall Street contains numerous scenes of adult content, ranging from full frontal nudity to snorting lines of coke (in some instances off of the female body) to countless excerpts of explicit language. In fact, The Wolf of Wall Street broke the record for the number of times any version of the word “fuck” was used on screen in the history of film (exactly 506 times). However, I don’t think that these pieces of the movie were included on the sole purpose of comedic relief. This content was imperative to the film due to the fact that it showed the viewer the outrageously dirty and profound lifestyle that Belfort chose to live.

Jordan Belfort was a witty, successful, arguably insane man who fell off the wagon after becoming extremely wealthy. Due to the morals upon which he became wealthy, he began to live his extravagant lifestyle based on these same morals. It was only a matter of time before the monstrous Belfort met his ultimate, tragic downfall. In the three hours of the movie, Scorsese captured this story while being able to play on more emotions than most people feel in a day.