The Wolf of Wall Street

Leonardo DiCaprio as the real wolf of Wall Street and the real life wolf on the right. 

The Wolf of Wall Street is based on the real life story of Jordan Belfort. A kid raised by two accountants in Bayside, Queens. When I think about how I was raised by a woman making two hundred dollars a week, I have no sympathy for this money-hungry shark, but I give Leonardo DiCaprio credit for inciting sympathy from me.

How do I even start expressing how outstanding this movie is? It encompasses all the great qualities that make a movie about greed great. It shows the positive, the hunger for more more MOAR and finally the negatives of money and it shows it in such a realistic way. We don't get the black and white Hollywood ending where the bad guy ends up where he belongs and the audience eats it up and thinks that in real life the bad guy gets what's coming to him. Sometimes the shark gets to eat the human and swim happily ever after and given that we've seen the crooks that made the stock market crash a couple of years ago, I think it's safe to say that this happens in real life as well.

The Wolf of Wall Street shows us the real Wall Street where the motto is "fuck the client, fuck the people, I need this money in my pocket." As Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) said in the movie, "Those schmucks didn't need the money. And besides, I could spend it better than them." I loved this part because this is how the sharks on Wall Street really think. We see them in the news all the time, they do their Ponzi schemes, burn all of the paper work, quit their job and go work for our government. It was refreshing to see it here in living color. It was raw and honest and it didn't apologize for it. It made fun of it and it made light of the issue, but I think the message got through because most people in the theatre were laughing because they didn't want to cry since they knew this was true. Granted, Belfort did not go work for government (thank God) but he made his own trashy contributions by spreading the love or really, the crap that was coming out of his mouth, in his seminars.

The way he spread that love was by spreading his smooth speaking skills. His skill of "not taking no for an answer" was taught to his own personal army. An army that consisted of other sharks, sharks he had created to keep the money flowing. The way he would go up in front of them and scream at them to motivate them and they would get up and cheer for him and yell "I fucking love you, Jordan!" made this operation seem like a church. These people would literally jump up and down and scream and dance around when this guy spoke and while I was horrified, I also admired the brilliance that is Leornado DiCaprio. He made it seem so real.

His life was a roller coaster of drugs, prostitutes and sex, but in the end it was money money money. My mind struggled to comprehend how Leonardo was able to go from a seductive, infatuated lover to a careless money making machine who had no regard for the "schmucks" he was ruining with every dollar he was making.

Then at one point I started to feel exhausted. It all became pointless. Maybe it's just that greed is hard to explain. Maybe because greed is derived from fear, it is irrational and thus hard to understand and cure. At one point I felt like shouting "Belfort, take the deal!"once the cops started to sniff around his shady operations. It came to the point where I just wanted him to give up. He was almost getting caught, he had discovered he wasn't invincible and I thought he would understand that he had been defeated. I just wanted to take a breath and release the tension, but he got up and said "They want me to say no, they want me to leave my home. This is my home! They are gonna have to come in with a wrecking ball, with a SWAT team to drag me out of here!" Aaaaand I lost all hope. Not even when he experienced an incident of  Titanic proportions did this guy see reason.

I wanted to impose my will on him. I wanted him to quit and to just take his money and run away. I wanted to ask him "when is enough, enough?" "What else could you possibly want?" And he would answer back and say, "I want more." "I've been a rich man and I've been a poor man and out of the two I'll always choose to be rich." And I would sag back down on my seat and watch the train wreck unfold like a mass murder with a symphony as background music, horrific but majestic in its colors and passion.

And then as we reach the climax he began to get desperate and I got desperate and then it all ended in the reality that is life: He gets away with it. Not only did he not serve a lot of years in jail, but he also leaves reminds the audience how invincible he really is, how above the poor man he will always be, he says  "When I got to the prison I was terrified, but I needn't have been. See, I forgot I was rich."

Then at the very end it all comes full circle with him in front of new disciples and a new shark hiding in its midst and he being the experienced shark attempts to draw him out with the simple command, "Sell me this pen."

Opinion

I can only say that this movie is outstanding for the following three reasons: 1) The debauchery that was going on that gave the positives of the lifestyle, at least from their point of view. 2) The children that were probably traumatized by their drug addicted father, the friends with similar violent lifestyles and the betrayal in the name of survival that show the negatives of Belfort's lifestyle. 3) The actors who were playing many different characters at once, who were monsters, wife beaters, coke addicts and abusive, but that still managed to get me on their side and have me rooting for them.

This is for you, Leo. For being the greatest actor on this earth today and for landing me back in America cinema in greatness after my stay in Korea cinema for the last couple of years.