It’s difficult not to get swept up in the charisma and passion of his many speeches. And by employing his degenerate hometown friends, he’s able to train and control a trusted team of apostles hungry to carry out his word.Īs a CEO, Belfort takes to the pulpit and addresses his staff like a preacher at a revival. He’s indiscriminate about his victims, willing to defraud the one percent and the middle class alike. The brokerage he founds, Stratton Oakmont, is made in his likeness – a wolf dressed in success’s clothing. This pursuit of money is as clever as it is without morals. Belfort and his partners profit by buying shares of penny stocks, artificially inflating their prices, and then dumping those stocks.
It’s during this low point in his career that he develops a pump and dump scheme.
After losing his job to Black Monday, the stock market crash of 1987, Belfort takes those keys and enters the penny stock market. Hanna takes fledgling stockbroker Belfort under his wing and teaches him that the keys to success as a broker are masturbation and drugs. Through this narrative device, the audience is put under the spell of an adroit salesman capable of selling his story as the American Dream.īelfort cuts his teeth at a traditional brokerage firm, losing whatever innocence he started out with under the mentorship of senior stockbroker Mark Hanna ( Matthew McConaughey). Scorsese skillfully utilizes this charisma by having Belfort in direct conversation with the audience throughout the movie. The obnoxious, yet undeniable, charisma of DiCaprio’s Belfort is nuanced and deeply rooted in the human condition. This is DiCaprio and Scorsese’s fifth collaborative effort and their comfort with each as actor and director shows. Chock-a-block of shock, sex, drugs, toxic masculinity, and unbridled capitalism, it follows Belfort from his relatively innocent beginnings as an eager young stockbroker breaking into the US market through his Icarian ascent to the bottom. Wolf of Wall Street is an adaptation of real-life former stockbroker (and current convicted felon) Belfort’s memoir of the same title. In this film, God is money, and we are congregated to witness a sermon from one of its most devout disciples, Jordan Belfort ( Leonardo DiCaprio). Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is a masterful, albeit coincidental, exploration of the 4th-century theologian and philosopher Augustine of Hippo’s question, “But what do I love when I love my God?” The question isn’t about any God in particular, of course, but how we are shaped by the things that we worship. This month, we’re celebrating the release of The Irishman with a retrospective of the work of Martin Scorsese.
The year I turned 26, as the head of my own brokerage firm, I made $49 million, which really pissed me off because it was three shy of a million a week. I'm a former member of the middle class raised by two accountants in a tiny apartment in Bayside, Queens.
4 The Wolf of Wall Street is one of the most iconic films of the 21st century Credit: Alamyįrom movie lovers to businessmen alike The Wolf of Wall Street is arguably one of the most iconic films of the 21st century.