Not that I'm complaining. Well, I am complaining, just not about the exploration of Margot Robbie. My concern is the film's message. While the MPAA freaked about keeping the sex, drugs, and bad language away from impressionable children, the larger obscenity in TWoWS passed unnoticed.
No, I don't mean the Academy once again snubbing DiCaprio at the Oscars.
Call me old fashioned, but I believe prison is meant to be punishment, not a vehicle to wealth and fame. Yet, that is precisely what it was for Mr. Belfort. In his case, prison was a vehicle to additional wealth and fame. For upon a mountain of cash amassed through illegal stock trading, he heaped revenue from the sale of his autobiography to wannabes and the rights to his autobiography to Hollywood.
Brief plot recap, in case you didn't see TWoWS, or were otherwise distracted: Jordan Belfort becomes a stock broker, opens his own firm, and through sex, drugs, and SEC violations that can only be described as Homeric, becomes unimaginably wealthy and a Wall Street icon. This continues until the FBI arrests him. Also, there is midget tossing.
Mr. Belfort is hardly the first to exploit this quirk in our national character. I dare say turning criminals into heroes has become something of an American tradition. From Oliver North to Scooter Libby, Martha Stewart to Piper Kerman. Heck, Rap and Hip Hop wouldn't even exist without prison. Neither would Scorsese's previous biopic hero Henry Hill. All the sinners saints, as they say. Mr. Scorsese even made a film about the guy who said that.
Oliver North probably got some nuns raped and a few peasant families machine-gunned into shallow graves. Mr. Libby was just a fall guy for higher ups. Martha Stewart mostly committed the crime of being powerful-while-vaginaed. Kerman's incarceration was an unjust ramification of a failed national drug policy that will vanish once enough purple hairs die off. Rap is merely destroying the urban black community by substituting violent misogynistic fairy tales for the hard work of generational improvement. Henry Hill may have trafficked in drugs (and extortion and murder), but his testimony arguably did the larger damage to organized crime. And Mick Jagger is, um, well I don't really have anything to say about Mick Jagger (although it was a little unsettling to watch a spandex-clad Christina Aguilera grind against a 70 year old).
On the other hand, Jordan Belfort and his ilk created havoc on a scale most criminals dare not dream. The value system celebrated in TWoWS is precisely what led to the economic meltdown of 2008. The time and players different; the hubris exactly the same. This cost Americans their jobs, their homes, their families, and in some cases their very lives. And did so on a scale that is utterly stupefying. The financial collapse was not some unforeseen outlier, Black-Scholes blindsided as fortune's fool. It was premeditated. The safety instruments in place were knowingly removed, no less than at Chernobyl. The public was put at risk for nothing more than greed. And no, Mr. Gekko, greed is not good. You are confusing greed with ambition. You are confusing it with innovation. If Adam Smith saw the excesses recently carried out in the name of the free market, he would embrace communism.
For his crimes, Belfort served 22 months in prison and was fined $110 million. While in prison, he wrote his memoirs which became a best-seller and a movie. He is currently making the rounds as a motivational speaker. Wikipedia informs me he is also dragging his feet on restitution; he has repaid only $11 million to date. If I am to believe TToWS, that dollar amount was about three-month's salary. For what? Jordan Belfort never cured a disease or invented a longer lasting light bulb. What made him worth more than a schoolteacher or small business owner could earn in a hundred lifetimes is beyond my ken. Because he could, seems to be Wall Street's answer. Social justice shouldn't be demanding a minimum wage, it should be demanding a maximum wage. For there is no reason any one person requires the wealth of a Jordan Belfort. His tale clearly demonstrates the devastation such wealth facilitates.
Still, nothing will dissuade many from viewing the protagonists in TToWS as heroes. Get rich or die tryin' the kids now say. Not so long ago, we admired the likes of Neil Armstrong, Hellen Keller, or Jonas Salk. Boring! America now oinks. How can these duds possibly inspire our children? Heroes put their needs first. Rules are for suckers. Besides, Apollo didn't find any giant robots on the moon, Keller's autobiography does not contain one coke-fueled orgy, and everybody knows the polio vaccine doesn't prevent polio, it causes autism. Sad to think America offers so little opportunity for legitimate advancement that people like Belfort are now role models.
Athens put Socrates to death for corrupting the young. In America, we make you rich and famous. There does not exist a more succinct eulogy for the two societies. The cradle of democracy, and its grave.
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