Sell me this pen

Rating: 8/10 (30 December 2013)

Meet Jordan Belfort, a handsome, rich and amoral stock broker who lives the American dream by surfing the crest of Wall Street excess, ripping people off, and flying just under the radar. He is the penny-stock king, a showman and glib sales hack enriching everyone around him who is willing to embrace his ideals and methods. Here is another Gorden Gecko, but one stripped of nuance, decorum, sobriety, client responsibility or ethical sensibility.
Scorsese shows us these excesses in broad strokes, almost in cartoon fashion. Everything is over the top in this movie. Belfort is not just loved by his staff; he's cheered by all his staff en masse, sometimes with tears pouring down their cheeks. He doesn't just do drugs; he does them constantly and in huge amounts. There are not just grand homes, luxury cars and yachts, but absolutely fabulous homes, cars and yachts. The movie does not just show us macho culture, it shows us office orgies and straight men being very openly sexual in front of each other. (Is this realistic, I'm wondering. I'm having a hard time with that.) Money, drugs and sex. Sex, drugs and money. Belfort is a drug addict and sex addict, but most of all he is a money addict, an addiction with no shame and no 12-step programme.
We've all suspected it would be a lot of fun to be filthy rich like this, to be able to indulge every desire. We want this story to be true. This movie presents this adolescent male fantasy on the screen for the masses. Wouldn't it be great to be 30, no 14, again, and yet to have all the money in the world. F*ck social responsibility, morality, sobriety, ethics, the law. Who cares if someone gets hurt. (This movie doesn't show us that.) These men are having fun, the kind of fun some of us secretly imagine when we think about what it would be like to be stinking, amorally rich. It's porn. Not just sexual porn, but money porn. Titillating views of the American dream. Naked avarice in all its glory.
Scorsese sucks the viewers in by making us laugh and showing us a good time. This movie is thoroughly entertaining. The sensationalizing and comedy humanizes these people and draws us into the movie as easily as if it were a ride at America's Wonderland.
Of course, the chickens will come home to roost. Belfort (and we) are reminded of this half way through the movie. This is an American movie, after all, so moralizing is to be expected. Despite the fun, despite the ribald comedy, we see that Belfort is not a nice person at all and in the end hurts even the people close to him.
However, Scorsese reminds us that the law is almost powerless to stop people like this. In the new America, the moralising is ineffective and soon turns into cynicism. Our hero is soon out, doing his thing to other people; the honest cop who put him in jail is still poor and riding the subway.
The final scene of the movie shows us the hopeful, desperate faces of the poor sods who have been suckered in by Belfort to attend one of his get-rich-quick seminars. The show goes on. They are staring back at us from the screen. They are us. Money drives us all. We all want to get rich. We all love this movie.