'The Wolf of Wall Street' marks ten years of debauchery- and depiction/endorsement disagreement

Martin Scorsese’s film about finance industry depravity is all very acidic, above-the-shoulders, mustard shit

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street arrived in December of 2013, ten years ago next week, and it had a lot in common with a certain strain of previous Scorsese crime pictures, most notably the 1990s mob epics Goodfellas and Casino. It applied that structure, instead, to stocks and finance. 

Like those films, The Wolf of Wall Street is about a criminal enterprise, spending a great deal of time explaining in voiceover how it works and where the money goes. Like those films, it makes that lifestyle look, at times, like a great deal of fun and excitement- while the bill comes due at the end, and the film makes clear that that fun came at the expense of the protagonist’s soul. And much like Goodfellas and Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street moves at about a million miles per hour. 

Scorsese directed the film from a script by Sopranos writer and Boardwalk Empire co-creator Terence Winter, in what was one of the best screenplays of its decade. While Scorsese’s film this year, Killers of the Flower Moon, had an even longer running time and was slow and contemplative, The Wolf of Wall Street might be the fastest-moving three-hour movie in history. 

It also held, for quite some time, the record for the most f-bombs in a movie, with more than 500, and nearly 700 curse words in total.

The Wolf of Wall Street told the story of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), a young man on the make in New York City who founded the disgraced penny-stock chop shop Stratton Oakmont in the 1990s. Originally hired by a legitimate Wall Street firm and schooled by its senior broker Mark Hanna (a scene-stealing Matthew McConaughey), Belfort is out of a job following the 1987 stock market crash, which leads him to the world of penny stocks. 

Applying the lessons taught in that multi-martini lunch with Hanna — both "the name of the game: moving the money from the client's pocket to your pocket” and “cocaine and hookers, my friend” — Belfort launches his own company, with the assistance at first of his childhood friends, most of whom have backgrounds in drug dealing. His sidekick is Donny (Jonah Hill, in a career-best turn), a cousin-marrying, goldfish-swallowing, publicly-piss-on-a-subpoena pervert. 

Belfort soon tosses his original wife (Cristin Milioti) overboard in favor of ex-model Naomi (Margot Robbie), as the firm carries out various acts of depravity, of the sexual, pharmacological, and fraud-based varieties. 

Throughout, the film could not be clearer: These are not good guys: 

Much like Goodfellas and Casino, everything falls apart for them in the third act, as the government closes in and the protagonists start to turn on each other. This is set up by the movie’s best scene, in which DiCaprio and an FBI agent (Kyle Chandler) talk on a boat. It’s one of those movie scenes in which the upper hand shifts multiple times: 

But the film ends by making clear that Belfort — who cooperated with the movie and even appears in the final scene as the guy introducing his fictitious self — appears to have walked away from all of that terrible behavior still prosperous. 

An earlier film, 2000’s Boiler Room, was loosely based on Stratton Oakmont’s story, and while The Wolf of Wall Street sort of sapped away any of its relevance, Boiler Room at least made time to show us the stories of some of the people who had their money stolen by the firm. And David O. Russell’s American Hustle, which was released just a few weeks prior that fall, was like a mediocre karaoke version of Scorsese, later cleared out by the real thing.

Despite the title, The Wolf of Wall Street is not set on the actual Wall Street. Sure, the firm Belfort works for at the beginning is an old-line Wall Street brokerage. Still, Stratton Oakmont is, it appears, based on Long Island, and staffed by outer-borough types without much formal education or the trappings of generational privilege. Of course, it is if you’re just using “Wall Street” as a synecdoche for the finance industry in general. 

And while the film arrived five years after the 2008 financial crisis kicked off an era of mistrust of Wall Street types, the misdeeds that crashed the economy and the ones committed by Belfort and Co. were very different and very separate. But like the pooh-bahs responsible for ’08, Belfort was never punished to the degree he likely should have been, although he at least did some prison time. And while The Wolf of Wall Street, like Goodfellas, ends with the protagonist cooperating against his friends, Jordan Belfort came out of it all much better than Henry Hill did.

One thing the film is somewhat famous for is that’s one of the modern movies to instigate the most major confusion about depiction and endorsement. Sure, it had the same problem as Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, a strident left-wing critique of greed in the financial industry that nevertheless inspired generations of people to admire Gordon Gekko, agree with him that “greed is good,” and pursue careers in that world. 

The Wolf of Wall Street, it appears, did the same. And it also inspired all sorts of gifs and memes, usually of DiCaprio dancing or smiling. 

But the film should not, in any sense, be seen as a “glorification” of Belfort or Stratton Oakmont. The film, once again, knows that these guys are foul degenerates. And yes, there’s some wealth porn in there, and the usual tension between showing off beautiful cars, boats, and houses and asking you to resent the people who own them. But that’s no more true of The Wolf of Wall Street than it is for Saltburn or the Real Housewives franchise. 

Even though the film must have seemed like a box office slam dunk with a major movie star attached, Scorsese had difficulty for years getting The Wolf of Wall Street financed, leading to investment from some questionable sources (more on that below). The film did make $400 million worldwide, making it the biggest hit of the director’s five-decade career. It was nominated for five Oscars, including Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, and acting nods for DiCaprio and Hill. But it won none, losing Best Picture to 12 Years a Slave. But I would wager that Scorsese’s film has been rewatched a great deal more than any of that year’s other awards contenders.

Another fascinating sidebar of The Wolf of Wall Street? Its ties to the 1MDB scandal, in which a businessman named Jho Low stole billions of dollars from Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, and used some of that money to come to America and ingratiate himself with Hollywood types. This included purchasing an Oscar statue that once belonged to Marlon Brando and gifting it to DiCaprio- and also invested millions in The Wolf of Wall Street itself, although how much he put in has been the subject of conflicting reports. DiCaprio has not been accused of any wrongdoing himself, although he did have to give back that Brando Oscar. 

So the movie about financial crimes was financed by an actual financial criminal. Low also hosted a $3 million party for the movie at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011, when the film was about to enter production, that was so over-the-top and expensive that the real Jordan Belfort, of all people, could tell that it must have been paid for with stolen money. It was a display of greed so ostentatious and over-the-top that it made Jordan Belfort turn up his nose.

The Wolf of Wall Street is streaming on Netflix, although it leaves the service on December 31.