The Joke of The Wolf of Wall Street

WARNING: Contains spoilers about The Wolf of Wall Street - sort of, I guess

The joke was on us as we left the 10:00 PM showing of The Wolf of Wall Street at the Times Square AMC Theater.  We had all enjoyed the film and it was a great film, but the conversation of the group of Long Island gentleman in front of me and my friend showed the great power this movie possess.  This group of men kept talking about how awesome Jordan Belfort was and how the government wrongfully took his money.  They kept talking about how they were born in the wrong decade and how they would have been even more debauched if they were of age during the time this film took place.  They had fallen for joke of the film.  These guys actually thought they could be wolves of Wall Street.  They thought that if they had been born 15 years earlier they would have just strolled into a life of high class hookers and midget tossing.  Worst of all, they sympathized with Jordan Belfort and his buddies. 

They weren’t the only ones to sympathize with Jordan Belfort.  The movie does an incredible job of making the bad guys so likable and the good guys the villains.  Leonardo DiCaprio does a helluva job and should get numerous awards for his performance.  You laugh at their antics and go along with all their wild tales of debauchery and swindling and when reality hits, you feel bad.  When Leonardo DiCaprio gets his comeuppance, nobody in the theater clapped or applauded like in the scenes where he was cheating on his wife or fooling his middle class investors.  The theater was silent when the FBI sent him for his slap on the wrist jail sentence.  Nobody cheered when the FBI agents fucked with Belfort on his yacht.  They only laughed when Belfort told them to get off and threw money at them.  The bad guy got caught and nobody cheered.

The movie does do its part to set Jordan up as the villain to the audience but nobody in the theater seemed to care.  In several scenes he will start talking to the audience about the illegal procedure he is doing or begin explaining a finance term and will abruptly stop in the middle of his discussion.  He says that you guys don’t care about this and the film cuts to more scenes of stacks of money and naked women.  The villain is looking the audience straight in the eye and telling us we are too dumb to understand these practices and don’t care anyway.  All we want to see is the money and excess we will never achieve or earn in our lives.  We want to engage in the fantasy world that Belfort resides in.  Belfort got rich off middle class suckers and proudly wears that as a badge of honor.  The majority of the people at the Times Square AMC were proudly cheering on every move Leo made.  They could not see that they were the suckers.  Every early sale Jordan and his pals make in the beginning of the film is off middle class suckers like the ones watching the film.  And those people (including myself) couldn’t have clapped more in glee to watch him win every time.

The danger and brilliance of this movie lies in the viewer who sympathizes with Jordan and aspires to live that life.  They see a man who got everything he ever wanted and more and only had to repent with a 3 year prison sentence (he got out after 22 months).  The man beat the system and now gets his life immortalized by one of the greatest directors of our time.  He won and we lost.  And anyone who comes out of this film and wants to live the Jordan Belfort life just proves that his kind continues to win while the rest of us continue to lose.