A shorter and denser version would have been so much better

Rating: 7/10 (26 January 2014)

A surprising film indeed. What is it about?
First of all it is about 45 minutes too long. The sex scenes and the orgies could have been cut short to a simple ellipse instead of a graphic depiction. That is one easy shortening that should have been used. Same thing with the drug scenes that are by far too numerous and too long. We got the message very fast that to succeed in Wall Street you have to be a sex addict, a drug-cocktail addict, an alcohol addict, a money addict, a money-lifting addict, a thief, a liar and a few other little things like that. We know that, we knew that and we have known it since at least American Psycho.
So, what is the original message?
It is simple. Anyone can succeed like that wolf in the USA in the most ruthless way possible with the most illegal and unethical means possible because the system is a filter-less abyss. There is no real filter to prevent these crimes and other offenses. There is no protection of any kind to prevent criminal minds to get into the business. The American system after 1987, date of the beginning of the wolf's career, is absolutely deregulated and it will be so till a very recent period, till a couple of years after the 2009 crisis. What's more most of those who are supposed to look after the various crimes committed in the financial field can be bought for a pittance, at times a little bit more, be they American, or Swiss, or whatever affiliation they have as for financial paradise.
Yet the FBI cannot be bought up. They are incorruptible, which I doubt very much. But well we can always think there is an Eliot Ness in every FBI special agent.
The worst part is that these people when they are caught will become, in their own interest, the most talkative monsters you can imagine. They will accept a deal at once. The principle is simple: "In Wall Street there is NO friend!" Partners, associates, colleagues, collaborators are ALL, all of them, nothing but competitors, enemies. As long as they can work as a pack they will, but as soon as the pack is under a real menace each one will go alone against the pack if necessary. A starving pack in the Rocky Mountains may die though if it comes to that the outcome will be ONE survivor and ONE survivor only. Wolves are cannibals in situations where survival is at stake.
As for a meaning that is very light and very naÃ¯ve. "Lupus est homo homini, non homo, non quom qualis sit novit" (wolf is man to man, no man when he does not know who the other is). Erasmus (15th-16th centuries) quoted it from Plautus (3rd-2nd centuries BCE), the original author, and then Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century made it a central concept of his vision of humanity in his work Leviathan. Nothing new under the sun. This phrase "Man is wolf to man" has become a catch phrase with the Industrial Revolution and Marxism. Though capitalism, and any form of it, did not invent it. Gladiators were Romans. The Celts burnt their criminals. And the modern times invented a lot of such cruel treatment of human beings as slaves or as playthings for sadistic or didactic practices, even calling it the death sentence. A woman was recently raped in public by more than fifteen men in a village in eastern India on the order of the village elders because she refused to break off with a man, her lover, who was from another village that was sexually off limits for these elders. Maybe the saying does not apply to women?
When we thus look at the film and wonder what makes it in anyway different, original, new, we have to say it is a brilliant cinematographic illustration of a common place idea and situation. The catch phrase of the film is that New Zealand has become the haven, paradise, refuge and shelter of all those criminals, financial, copyright or data all together and the same, where they can go on striving without any menace from the FBI. Australia is a second haven of the type and then Russia too is trying to set her feet in that juicy field. The juice is not only money, it is also a lot of blood.
That last remark, the catch phrase, the final scene of the film is the most powerful argument for a shorter film, a film that could have been a lot shorter. "Sell me that pen" becomes very shallow and trite after three hours of ranting, raving, partying, raping, raging, and so many other off-normalcy attitudes, actions and principles. The film is in itself an orgy of ever and endlessly repeating sequences: we are framed in a million images of exactly the same value and tinge and color and hue. What a shame! Scorsese could do better.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU