A clock strikes 4 p.m. in the bustling offices of an up-and-coming New York City brokerage firm.
The markets are closed for the day. The head of the firm, Jordan Belfort, steps up, microphone in hand, to address his acolytes.
The firm, Stratton Oakmont, is capping off an impressive month, he says. They’ve had $28.7 million in gross commissions, much of it from the garbage “pink sheet” stocks that he’s taught them to sell with the urgency and professionalism that he picked up selling household name stocks at a bigger, now-defunct Wall Street firm.
Now that their conning is done for the day, Belfort (played by Leonardo DiCaprio, by the way) says it’s time “for their weekly act of debauchery.” He is offering one of their female assistants $10,000 to have her head shaved in front of everyone.
The mostly male crowd cheers on, Belfort ramping them up with calls to, “Let the scalping begin!” She is planning to use the money for breast implants, he shouts into the microphone as another man buzzes clumps of big brown hair off her head. Is that true? To him it is!
The woman sits nervously, her face contorting somewhere between a stoically professional smile and a grimace. She’s at the center of a dangerously ramped-up crowd that is jeering at her humiliation, and you can see her reevaluate her choice every excruciating second she’s on screen.
Before her head is fully shaved, though, the spectacle evolves and the crowd moves on. Belfort says it’s time to “blow the roof” off their offices. The carnival must move on to its next perverse act.
Cue a makeshift, mostly nude marching band, and men in tuxedos carrying trays of champagne. They stream into the office orderly, the band playing John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Then, Belfort calls for strippers. America!
Two streams of women now enter from opposite sides of the room, and when they collide in the middle, the patriotic march transitions to the riotous blues song “Smokestack Lightning” by Howlin’ Wolf.
The lights in the office begin to flicker as the crowd reaches a fever pitch, like the movie can barely contain their depravity. It’s not the last time this will happen, either.
Such orgiastic excess is on display throughout Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, which chronicles Belfort’s ascent (or descent) to the elite echelons of American greed and the many people he went over, under, and through to get there.
And this film, which turns 10 this month, is one of the master director’s greatest achievements precisely because Scorsese does not try to contain it.
The Wolf of Wall Street is bursting at the seams with manic energy; not the bloody mania that sustains many of his other pictures, but a different kind of violence. For Belfort to snort cocaine out of a woman’s ass, for him to toss back Quaaludes like Tic Tacs, he must sell a lie to an unsuspecting American public. And then he must keep going, lower and lower.
Early on, before he goes out on his own and crashes into Wall Street with his pink slip stock business model, he’s given priceless advice on how to operate in this world. Before the first firm he works for crashes, his boss (a wonderful, brief performance by Matthew McConaughey) takes him out to lunch and lays down the law.
You’re not here to make clients money, he tells Belfort. “It’s not fucking real,” he says.
When Belfort hears this, he’s still a low-level grunt selling big-name “blue chip” stocks. His success lies in taking that advice and lowering Wall Street’s business standards even further.
He puts a smooth-talking layer of bullshit on stocks for very uncertain ventures that are essentially startups. Why? Because he can get a bigger commission. About a 50% commission, in fact.
Terence Winter’s script, based on Belfort’s memoir, lays these schemes out in plain sight, and Scorsese weaves them into the fabric of the film brilliantly. There are moments when Belfort explains an investment loophole or trick in great detail, and he’ll stop mid-thought to let us know it’s not important. What is important is that he got away with it, for a while.
Casting DiCaprio in this role took both the director and star’s collaborative artistry to its apex. DiCaprio brings the relaxed confidence of a movie star to a man who wants so badly to be seen as one. When he’s in front of his grunts ranting about wealth or MC’ing a fucked-up game, he is. When he’s arriving home coked out of his mind in a helicopter at 3 a.m., he is… until his wife Naomi (Margot Robbie, in a scene-stealing, star-making performance) tosses water on him in bed and berates him for ruining their lawn.
DiCaprio’s physicality elevates some of the movie’s more riotous setpieces to a new level. The obvious example, to me, is the scene where he and his friend and co-conspirator Donnie (Jonah Hill, disgusting and tremendous) take expired Quaaludes that have a delayed reaction. They hit while he’s on a country club pay phone with his private investigator (Bo Dietl, playing himself), who has just warned him that his home phones are bugged by the FBI.
Belfort becomes non-verbal and falls to the floor, the camera staying overhead as he writhes around uncontrollably. He realizes, in voiceover, that he must make it to his car and warn Donnie not to use the phones to do business. His hilarious crawl to his car has a silent comedy purity to it, and the resulting drugged-out throwdown with Donnie back at Belfort’s home is a stunningly choreographed bit of slapstick.
It’s one of the few times that the movie lingers in a given moment; Scorsese and his actors make you feel the hilarious desperation.
This is, above all, a movie about a desperate ego. When it was first released, and even to this day, I’ve seen people say that the movie doesn’t go far enough to condemn Belfort’s bad behavior. This is despite several instances throughout where he’s told that the way he acts is obscene.
To me, the grotesque laughter that Belfort and the other brokers share at their firm is more disturbing when it’s uninterrupted, but the way Scorsese pushes everything to the limit unlocks a more unsettling level to the movie.
Is this not the kind of American Dream we’re told to aspire to? And if the dream goes too far, then what?
As Richard Brody wrote in The New Yorker:
In the same way that Scorsese has excitedly portrayed gangland hits or brutal boxing matches, he can’t help but be drawn to this kind of violent, inherently vulgar behavior. And neither can I.
The party always ends, though. The gangsters are in Witness Protection, in jail, or dead; the prize-winning fighter is alone, disfigured, and monologuing in a nightclub.
In The Wolf of Wall Street, Belfort’s decline is relentless in the way it implicates the audience. As he faces prison time for his crimes, his home life with Naomi quickly deteriorates.
One night, he rapes her, does a pile of cocaine, and then punches her when she attempts to stop him from running off with their daughter. He crashes one of their sports cars with the young girl in the passenger seat before her mother and their housekeeper pull her out and berate him.
Here the rug is pulled out from the entire movie; its gleeful excesses finally come crashing down. It’s all shot and edited like a frantic, drugged-out nightmare, but then, so were all those parties.
I consider The Wolf of Wall Street the best film of the 2010s. It’s a film I wrestle with constantly; its push and pull between outright comedy and karmic tragedy lingers in a way that few films manage. That Scorsese and his collaborators can sustain this for 3 hours is extraordinary; there are so many sequences, individual gestures, and line deliveries I wish I could ramble on and on about.
The movie can often feel like the work of a much younger filmmaker, but it is also imbued with the collective wisdom of someone older, who knows better. The Cocaine Scorsese of the ‘70s and ‘80s would’ve run himself ragged trying to keep up with Sober, Elder Scorsese.
Scorsese’s films since this one have been much more characteristic late-period films, from his long-gestating religious passion project Silence up to his most recent epic, The Killers of the Flower Moon.
These are tremendous films, but they are also deeply melancholy meditations on their respective themes. Their tragedies are more apparent, if no less moving. I think the tragedy of The Wolf of Wall Street sticks with me precisely because it doubles as one of the great modern comedies.
The nihilistic laughter at the movie’s core is louder when we join in.
The Wolf of Wall Street is currently available to stream on Netflix and Paramount+
Matt Erspamer is a writer and movie lover who lives in Seattle.
Any views or opinions expressed in this letter are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Watershed Voice staff or its board of directors.