Belfort is inculcated into the ‘sect’ of brokers by Hanna (Matthew McConaughey), an eccentric broker who makes a lot of money and who also seems to have established a link between excessive masturbation and the financial industry (thanks Woody). Belfort primes his parishioners into an excelis of fervour for the holy dollar, stamping up and down his platform like an evangelical preacher, and the Rolex on his arm only underlines the comparison. In America the lines between business and religion are virtually non-existent, and Scorsese frames many of Belfort’s ‘pep’ speeches to his brokers as a quasi-religious or evangelical experience. DiCaprio has seldom been better, and he’s surprisingly matched in a couple of superb bedroom confrontations, by young Australian actress Margot Robbie, as his trophy wife Naomi. The film works superbly well when it focuses of Belfort’s behaviour, particularly as embodied in Leonardo DiCaprio’s powerhouse and committed performance. The film could lose 30 minutes and not suffer a sequence where Belfort and his partner Donnie (Jonah Hill) overdose on old Quaaludes feels superfluous, (to non pillheads at least!) as does much of the associated Switzerland bank subplot. Scorsese tends to black comedy and excess in this satire, and if he’s essaying a culture where ‘too much is never enough’, then he has successfully translated that via the bloated running time and the opulent visual feast on offer. Modern, poorly regulated capitalism is attempting to turn this model on its head. In fact ‘survival of the fittest’ incorporates the notion that co-operation is the thing that’s allowed humans to dominate a planet where we are not the fastest or the strongest animals, we don’t have the best eyesight, or the best hearing, yet it’s humans who stand atop the natural world. Darwinian Theory even mentions empathy and co-operation as being more beneficial to humans than simply the triumph of the strongest. As Tom Shadyac points out in his earnest 2010 documentary I Am, no civilisation had previously developed a model where the best hunter kept 99% of the meat, generally in a primitive society co-operation demanded a sharing of the spoils to benefit the society as a whole. Well, neither is scamming gullible and trusting investors out of their hard earned wages, but any acknowledgement of ethics would get short shrift from Belfort, a slick operator in the trenches of capitalism in Reagan’s America. ![]() “Poverty is not noble”, so says Jordan Belfort, the ‘wolf’ of Wall Street. We all knew it was bad, but this bad!? If ever there was a case against the cumulative social effects of unfettered capitalism it would have to be this that half of the world’s population have no more assets than a number who could easily be accommodated on a single private jet. that the wealthiest 85 individuals on the planet have the same net worth as the poorest 3.5 billion people. In order to draw attention to the worldwide disparity of wealth a statistic has been released by an advocacy group to exercise the minds of the delegates. Martin Scorsese’s epic and somewhat overblown satire arrives in town the week of a conference in Davos, Switzerland where the 20 wealthiest countries in the world get together to set some financial parameters for the future of the planet. Attempting humour, the reality of his elitist and out of touch jibe made the joke particularly hollow, and The Wolf of Wall Street, while a fine and visceral film in many areas, suffers from the same clunky disconnect. ![]() Satire is a slippery thing, and tone and timing is all, as uber-rich Mittford Romney found out after the above quote came back to haunt him. "When I was a boy, I used to think that becoming rich and becoming famous would make me happy. Boy was I right!" – Mitt Romney
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