wall street movie analysis essay

Wall Street (1987): Ethics Analysis Essay

Introduction, scene analysis, works cited.

Wall Street film is a well-crafted story giving insights to the kind of morality found in the Wall Street. Oliver Stone sheds light on greed and corruption that dominated the Wall Street. Coincidentally, this masterpiece hit the markets exactly 60 days after the famous stock market crash of 1987.

The movie revolves around Bud, a young and ambitious stockbroker who is out to make it big in life. The other character of interest here is Gekko, a corporate raider who knows when to make a move and when to stay put. Gekko happens to be Bud’s hero probably due to his successful history in the stock market.

This paper focuses on the moral side of the story not the financial dealings that surround the Wall Street. It focuses on the scene where Bud meets Gekko for business dealings until Bud reevaluates his decision to continue with the dealings that Gekko gets him in.

We meet Bud as the movie opens trying to squeeze his way past a crowded work place in Jackson & Steinham securities firm. Immediately we realize that of late, he has been tirelessly trying to meet Gekko; a smart broker who knows what happens where in the stock markets.

It is important to note that Gekko will pursue his selfish ambitions regardless of what happens to other people even if they are his friends. Bud calls Gekko’s office relentlessly for thirty-nine days until he finally secures an appointment. To set things in motion, Bud looks for a gorgeous birthday gift, which he delivers personally to Gekko.

Unfortunately, Bud makes the first mistake; he gives some inside information about Bluestar Airlines Company, run by his Carl, his father. This information makes Gekko have some interest in Bud and given the hero that Bud sees in Gekko, a long term strong alliance between the two is inevitable.

As anticipated, Gekko takes Bud in and offers him a big opportunity to make good money; however, Bud has to play the game according to rules. Nevertheless, due to his hunger to make it big in life, Bud does not think much of what he has to lose to gain the good life he badly craves.

The alliance takes off immediately and Bud spends a lot of time with Gekko; a feat that earns Bud large perks. Bud is now entitled to expensive meals, fat cheques, and even beautiful lass by the name Darien. Bud is so carried away in this flush life that he forgets hustles and bustles of this life.

Within no time, Bud becomes a partaker of corporate avarice and corruption. Bud engages in slash-and-burn exploits courtesy of Gekko; this approach to business is more adventurous, thrilling and rewarding than the more principled prosaic business dealings championed by Lou Mannheim; a veteran trader. Life to Bud is at least now bearable for he can afford an up market apartment and take Darien to expensive outings.

Nevertheless, there is a price to pay for everything in this life and good things in life are not free. Someone has to either work very hard or deal very hard. Bud chose the latter and soon he is to pay the price. Bud had introduced Gekko to Bluestar Airlines owned by his father Carl.

However, due to his greed, Gekko suggest to Bud that they should sell Bluestar Airline assets, an incidence that will leave them immensely rich. Unfortunately, this move will leave Carl, Bud’s father and all workers in this company, who happens to be Bud’s friends, jobless. This is a decisive moment for Bud who has to choose between his father’s well being and his fortunes.

Luckily, Bud chooses to protect his father and friends working in Bluestar Airlines. He sets out to scuttle Gekko’s plans to salvage his father’s business. After approaching Darien, she refuses to betray Gekko leading Bud to dispose her marking the end of their relationship.

These events act as a revelation to Bud who painfully realizes that the price required to sustain his flush lifestyle is too expensive for him to pay. After breaking ties with Gekko and Darien, Bud strategies on how to save this company and he succeeds even though he ends up in prison.

In relation to God’s call to worship him alone, Bud made a mistake. He went against this sanctimonious call and worshiped idols; that is, money. The fact that he knew what he was doing was wrong and did not stop it before it began, is a clear indication that he was not willing to own up to this call from God. However, Bud has some morals left in him as he chooses to spare his father and friends.

However, this portrays partiality because all along, he has been hurting other people but it did not matter as long as it was not his father or friends. God calls us to act without partiality, letting his love dwell in our hearts, something that Bud went against. All this is because of money: the root of all evils.

Wall Street reflects the relationship between evil, coming from greed of money and upholding moral principles. People have the free will to choose between good and evil. Bud represents this clearly. As the movie starts, he uses his freewill to choose evil and engage in dirty business dealings. As the movie proceeds, he still uses freewill to choose good over evil as he breaks ranks with Gekko and Darien. Bud does not honor God’s call to get id of idols and worship him alone.

Stone, Oliver._The Wall Street_. IMDb, 1987.

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Bibliography

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The Wolf of Wall Street (2013 Film)

By martin scorsese, the wolf of wall street (2013 film) analysis.

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This film begins with Jordan Belfort out to be part of the world of Wall Street . He gets a job at a top firm and soon learns that even the most successful of brokers aren't seeking to walk any line of morality that just might serve the billions of dollars they are betting with. But Belfort, a man who wants to be successful, is willing to play along. He joins the Wall Street "fraternity" and becomes "one of the boys." He does drugs, buys women and takes what he wants, including his next wife, Naomi , who's with another man when Jordan meets her.

This culture, revealed throughout the film is a scary one as it is so attractive that many who watch want to be a part of it. Money, women, and seemingly an endless ability to do whatever they want because they can pay for it. It's a dangerous combination that drives the ego on pride in a way that morality is lost. And any hope for redemption comes through a mountain of shame that is easier to dismiss than it is to deal with.

And this covering up continues through the relationship with the Swiss banker who gives up Belfort for a lighter sentence. And with the dominoes toppling down, Belfort gives up his friends to the FBI for a lighter sentence. And what we see is the lack of loyalty among thieves, and the aggression of their taking whatever they want becomes a feeble disloyalty to save whatever of their life remains. Interestingly enough, when we contrast Jordan's giving everyone up to Brad 's keeping his mouth shut we find that though Brad is a violent, hot-headed man he has a code or a line rather that he won't cross by giving up anyone else. He shoulders responsibility in a way no one else does in this film.

This doesn't make him a saint, but simply provides the necessary characterization of loyalty that everyone else breaks. But, without a true willingness to remain centered from morality, anyone is a potential victim to the alluring nature of riches as it gives access to places and experiences most will never have. But it also opens the floodgates to predatory behavior that is only after experiencing pleasure at the expense of the safety of anyone in the situations with them.

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Study Guide for The Wolf of Wall Street (2013 Film)

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013 Film) study guide contains a biography of director Martin Scorsese, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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• Introduction

Wall Street

Review by brian eggert september 20, 2010.

After releasing Platoon in 1986, Oliver Stone received rampant praise. It was his third attempt at directing and his second critical breakthrough after Salvador , released the same year. It earned eight Oscar nominations and won four, including awards for Best Picture and Best Director. Stone’s name was all over Hollywood; he received offers to direct from every major studio. And though he could have made bigger pictures, he chose to pursue a passion project about the world of Wall Street power brokers as a dedication to his father, an honest stockbroker years before. Stone and co-writer Stanley Weiser blasted through their eternally quotable script, originally titled Greed . And with the release of Wall Street , Stone continued with his impressive and unthinkable streak of one film per year that lasted him well into the 1990s.

When researching his subject, Stone visited stock floors and dwelled on the details of how brokers speak and the technology used. He met with actual Wall Street power brokers whose lives he discovered were filled with the excesses—the sex and parties and drugs—that would eventually be depicted in the film. Consultants such as former deputy mayor Ken Lipper and David Brown, a broker convicted of insider trading, lent the details. Still, Stone quickly realized that he was more interested in the father-son relationship at the core of his narrative. His relationship with his own father had been filled with admiration and regret; through several films, his relationship with his father served as inspiration. Thus, Wall Street became a personal project about a father-son relationship, about a boy resenting his father and searching for another father figure, only to be betrayed, bringing him closer to his birth father.

Charlie Sheen plays Bud Fox, a naïve but enthusiastic young broker who, through persistence, finagles his way into the office of Gordon Gekko, the power broker famed for moves like selling NASA stock short mere moments after the Challenger crash. Fox tries to sell Gekko on his “dog” stocks, but he sees right through them, so Fox sells Gekko on an insider tip that the airline where his father (Martin Sheen) is a mechanic will be expanding, given a recent not-yet-announced settlement payout. Information is the game, and Fox quickly becomes an info lackey for Gekko, who plays Fox with a Machiavellian spin. Meanwhile, Fox’s bank account grows. He begins dating shallow socialite interior designer Darien (Daryl Hannah). Finally, he lays down plans to help his father’s airline in a new buyout championed by Gekko. Of course, Gekko betrays Fox and plans to liquidate the airline. When Fox discovers this, he plots to manipulate the airline’s stock and drop the price to force Gekko to sell; he then convinces another moralist power broker (Terrence Stamp) to buy the airline, thus saving his father’s job.

The film was budgeted for around $17.6 million, and Twentieth Century Fox picked up the bill. Costs were alleviated by tie-in and product placement deals from contributors desperate to be associated with the high-class New York City lifestyle planned for the film. Fortune magazine won a bid to place Gordon Gekko on a faux cover that could appear in the film; Carillon liquor supplied the booze; Peugeot provided the luxurious cars; Evian water quenched the thirst of the Wall Street elite; Advil cured their headaches; Motorola supplied the now absurdly large cell phones. The film was released in the wake of the 1987 market crash, so the subject was on the collective minds of Americans, earning the picture $44 million in U.S. box-office receipts. Douglas would win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance, the film’s only nomination.

As critics pointed out upon its release, there’s a slight melodramatic air that does the film a disservice next to dialogue otherwise dominated by business lingo. Stone and Weiser’s script expertly reduces complicated financial concepts to their most basic, salient form for general audience consumption. Anyone can watch the film, and though they may not follow the technical jargon, they follow the emotional core of the narrative enough to know what’s happening. Yet, at times the film sounds like an after-school special on the dangers of insider trading, with the newly corrupt Fox convincing his attorney friend (James Spader) by arguing, “Everybody’s doin’ it.” Later, in his fallout with Darien, Fox admits, “I’m lookin’ [in the mirror], and I don’t like what I see,” while she laments, “We would’ve made a good team.” This corny, pointedly ‘80s dialogue makes a serious viewing of the film suffer today, but it’s counter-acted by the bravado speeches by Douglas’ insidious Gekko.

Stone chose Michael Douglas for Gordon Gekko after Warren Beatty and Richard Gere passed. Douglas sought acting credibility after fluff roles like those in Romancing the Stone and wanted to further avoid falling into another producer-actor position. When Douglas took the part, he was attracted to the pages upon pages of monologues that would later become among the most quotable in all of cinema. He assumed the dialogue would be edited down upon filming, but Stone left the speeches intact, shockingly so. Metaphor-laden dialogue filled with violent imagery (“When I get a hold of the son of a bitch who leaked this, I’m gonna tear his eyeballs out and I’m gonna suck his fucking skull.”) transformed the financial shark character into a villainous monster. Dressed to kill in clothing based on that of real power brokers, Gekko’s pivotal scene comes when he tells his fellow Teldar Paper shareholders that he plans to restructure and ultimately “liberate” (e.g., liquidate) their company, that “Greed is good. Greed works.” Somehow, this devilish, charismatic character makes it sound like a positive thing. In his supporting role, Douglas steals the picture and remains the principal discussion point whenever the film is recalled. With the help of an Oscar, it was the performance that made Douglas into a serious actor; that year, he also released Fatal Attraction , the top-grossing film of 1987.

The other actors feel dreary in comparison to the high-energy, rapid-fire dialogue of Gordon Gekko. Charlie Sheen was hired for the acclaim he received on Platoon , though he simply wasn’t talented enough to make many of his scenes believable. But he’s watchable in the role. That’s more than can be said for Daryl Hannah, playing the epitome of ‘80s excess with profound flatness. According to set reports, Sean Young, who plays Gekko’s wife, wanted to switch roles with Hannah and became “irritating” about it, but the filmmakers wouldn’t budge. (Though, it would’ve been the right choice.) Hannah clearly doesn’t understand her role, and that kills the entire Fox-Darien subplot. But after his Best Director win at the previous year’s Oscars, perhaps Stone was too proud to admit that he had made a casting mistake.

Aside from Douglas, Stone’s most inspired casting choice was Hal Holbrook, playing the character based on Louis Stone, the director’s stockbroker father, to whom the film was dedicated. Holbrook appears onscreen with such an assured sense of morality that lines like “The main thing about money, Bud, it makes you do things you don’t want to do” feel philosophical. Whereas when Holbrook says, “Stick to the fundamentals,” the audience believes him, even if Fox doesn’t. Also giving Charlie Sheen advice was his real-life father, Martin Sheen. The scenes between the father and son Sheens contain a deep emotional truth shared by the actors. The elder Sheen’s few scenes in the film are among the very best, leading to his most crucial advice: “Create instead of living off the buying and selling of others.” This theme echoes throughout the film, condemning those like Gekko and praising those blue-collar workmen busting their hump to earn a buck. Stone has always believed in the American ideal that with hard work comes success.

Stone’s formal style of direction varies from film to film, while his themes carry over and define his work as well as his auteurist signatures. He engages powerful, complicated issues and places them into high-energy but preachy films. His sermonizing must be forgiven, however, as his films also prove incredibly entertaining and often insightful. This is the best feature of Stone’s work. For Wall Street , the director employed flat lenses, close-ups, and handheld cameras for a nonstop sense of movement, all coupled with bravado multi-frame editing sequences that impel the film’s momentum. Beyond the visual, Stone assigns electronic music largely featuring David Byrne and Brian Eno from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and the ironic choice of the Talkingheads’ song “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)” for a soundtrack with an enduring musical dynamism of electronic sounds and engrained beats.

Wall Street retains an important place in film history mainly for the iconic role of Gordon Gekko and the performance by Douglas. Gekko’s mantra “Greed is Good” has become a wretched but standard staple in the business world, endlessly quoted and reflected as a signifier of 1980s business folly. (That is, until it became readily practiced and shamelessly observed in modern business.) Unfortunately, the other major actors, aside from Douglas, and occasional missteps in an overly melodramatic script, bring the film’s lasting effect down, whereas Charlie and Martin Sheen’s pairing feels inspired today. Stone’s time capsule film represents a specific period in history with incredible tangibility, communicating a complex setting with the clarity of straightforward and emotionally lucid dramatic turns. It’s an imperfect film that nonetheless has stirred audiences since its release, inspiring the occasional offshoot (see 2000’s Boiler Room ) and even a sequel, and will no doubt continue to be a benchmark of fiscally minded films for years to come.

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Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street" is abashed and shameless, exciting and exhausting, disgusting and illuminating; it's one of the most entertaining films ever made about loathsome men. Its star Leonardo DiCaprio has compared it to the story of the Roman emperor Caligula, and he's not far off the mark. 

Adapted by Terence Winter from the memoir by stockbroker Jordan Belfort, who oozed his way into a fortune in the 1980s and '90s, this is an excessive film about excess, and a movie about appetites whose own appetite for compulsive pleasures seems bottomless. It runs three hours, and was reportedly cut down from four by Scorsese's regular editor Thelma Schoonmaker . It's a testament to Scorsese and Winter and their collaborators that one could imagine watching these cackling swine for five hours, or ten, while still finding them fascinating, and our own fascination with them disturbing. This is a reptilian brain movie. Every frame has scales. 

The middle-class, Queens-raised Belfort tried and failed to establish himself on Wall Street in a more traditional way—we see his tutelage in the late '80s at a blue chip firm, under the wing of a grinning sleazeball played by Matthew McConaughey —but got laid off in the market crash of 1987. He reinvented himself on Long Island by taking over a penny stock boiler room and giving it an old money name, Stratton Oakmont, to gain the confidence of middle- and working-class investors. Per Wikipedia, at its peak, "the firm employed over 1000 stock brokers and was involved in stock issues totaling more than $1 billion, including an equity raising for footwear company Steve Madden Ltd." Belfort and his company specialized in " pump and dump " operations: artificially blowing up the value of a nearly worthless stock, then selling it at a big profit, after which point the value drops and the investors lose their money. Belfort was indicted in 1998 for money laundering and securities fraud, spent nearly two years in federal prison and was ordered to pay back $110 million to investors he'd deceived. 

Taking its cues from gangster pictures, " Wolf " shows how Belfort rose from humble origins, becoming rich and notorious (the title comes from an unflattering magazine profile that caught the attention of federal prosecutors). This Robin Hood-in-reverse builds himself a team of merry men drawn from various sundry corners of his life. All have both given names and Damon Runyon-esque nicknames: Robbie Feinberg, aka "Pinhead" (Brian Sacca), Alden Kupferberg, aka "Sea Otter" ( Henry Zebrowski ), the dreadfully-toupeed "Rugrat" Nicky Koskoff (P.J. Byrne), "The Depraved Chinaman" Chester Ming ( Kenneth Choi ), and Brad Bodnick ( Jon Bernthal ), a DeNiro-esque neighborhood hothead who's known as the Quaalude King of Bayside. His office enforcer is his volcanic dad ( Rob Reiner ), who screams about expenditures and workplace sleaze, but often seems to live vicariously through the trading floor's young wolves.

Belfort's right hand man Donnie Azoff ( Jonah Hill ) is perhaps even more conscienceless than Belfort: a hefty wiseass with gleaming choppers who quits his job at a diner after one conversation with the hero, joins his scheme, helps him launder money, and introduces him to crack—as if Belfort didn't have enough intoxicants in his system, on top of the adrenaline he generates by making deals and bedding every halfway attractive woman who crosses his path. As McConaughey's character tells Belfort early on, this subset of investing is so scummy that drugs are mandatory: "How the f— else would you do this job?" At one point a broker declares that they're doing all that coke and all those Quaaludes and guzzling all that booze "in order to stimulate our freethinking ideas." 

Belfort is married when the tale begins, to a good and respectable woman who doesn't approve of his financial shenanigans or chronic infidelity, but he soon throws her over for a blond and curvy trophy named Naomi LaPaglia (Australian actress Margot Robbie ), then marries her and starts supporting her in the style to which they've both become accustomed. After a few years, Belfort is living in a mansion that another DiCaprio character, Jay Gatsby, might find gaudy, and buying a yacht, and helicoptering to and from meetings and parties while drugged out of his mind. Then a federal prosecutor named Patrick Denham ( Kyle Chandler ) enters the picture, sweating Belfort by confronting him on his own turf (including Belfort's yacht) and letting him brag on his own awesomeness until he hangs himself.

Imagine the last thirty minutes of " GoodFellas " stretched out to three hours. That's the pace of this movie, and the feel of it. It's one damned thing after another: stock fraud and money laundering; trips to and from Switzerland to deposit cash in banks (and give the increasingly wasted Belfort a chance to flirt with his wife's British aunt, played by "Absolutely Fabulous" costar Joanna Lumley ); rock-and-pop driven montages with ostentatious film speed shifts (including a slow-motion Quaalude binge); and some daringly protracted and seemingly half-improvised dialogue scenes that feel like tiny one-act plays. The best of these is McConaughey's only long scene as Belfort's mentor Mark Hanna, who at one point thumps a drum pattern on his chest while rumble-singing a la Bobby McFerrin ; this eventually becomes the anthem of Belfort's firm, and it's weirdly right, as it suggests a tribal war song for barbarians on permanent rampage. 

As is often the case in Scorsese's films, "Wolf" gives alpha male posturing the attraction-repulsion treatment, serving up the drugging and whoring and getting-over as both spectacle and cautionary tale. In his most exuberant performance since " Titanic ," DiCaprio plays Belfort as a pipsqueak Mussolini of the trading floor, a swaggering jock who pumps his guys up by calling them "killers" and "warriors" and attracts hungry, self-destructive women, partly via brashness and baby-faced good looks, but mostly by flashing green. The film lacks the mild distancing that Scorsese brought to "GoodFellas" and " Casino ." The former contrasted Henry Hill's matter-of-fact narration with occasionally shocked reactions to bloodshed; "Casino" adopted a Stanley Kubrick-like chilly detachment, as if everyone involved were narrating from a cloud in Heaven or a pit in Hell. "Wolf" is in the thick of things at all times, to suffocating effect, depriving the viewer of moral anchors. 

This is not the same thing as saying that the film is amoral, though. It's not. It's disgusted by this story and these people and finds them grotesque, often filming them from distorted angles or in static wide shots that make them seem like well-dressed animals in lushly decorated terrariums. 

You can tell how much Belfort cares about his people by the way his narration segues from an anecdote about a broker who fell into a spiral of misery and shame: "He got depressed and killed himself three years later," Belfort says over a photo of a corpse in a bathtub trailing blood from slit wrists. Then, without missing a beat, he says, "Anyway..." The brokers classify prostitutes by cost and attractiveness, referring to them as "blue chips, "NASDAQs" and "pink sheets" (or "skanks"); they're warm-blooded receptacles to be screwed and sent on their way, much like the firm's clients, including shoe mogul Steve Madden, whose deal Belfort describes as an oral rape. The directorial high point is a Belfort-Azoff Quaalude binge that spirals into comic madness, with Azoff blubbering and freaking out and stuffing his face and collapsing, and Belfort suffering paralysis during a panicked phone call about his money and then crawling towards his car like a nearly-roadkilled animal, one agonizing inch at a time. 

These images of censure and humiliation—and there are a lot of them, including a gif-worthy moment of Belfort paying a prostitute to stick a lit candle in his bum—coexist with moments that get off on the men's howling and profit-making and chest-thumping. We're supposed to figure out how we feel about the mix of modes, and accept that if there were no appeal whatsoever to this kind of behavior, no one would indulge in it. This isn't wishy-washy. It's honest.

Scorsese and Winter never lose track of the bigger picture. In theory, the movie's subject is the Wall Street mentality, which is just a clean-scrubbed version of the gangster mentality showcased in Scorsese's "Mean Streets," "GoodFellas" and "Casino" (one could make a case that guys like Belfort are the ones who pushed the Vegas mob out of Vegas). "Wolf" starts with a Fellini-like party on the floor of Belfort's firm, then freeze-frames on Belfort tossing a dwarf at a huge velcro target, literally and figuratively abusing the Little Guy. The traders get away with their abuse because most people don't see themselves as little guys, but as little guys who might some day become the big guy doing the tossing. "Socialism never took root in America," John Steinbeck wrote, "because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Belfort chides the prosecutor Denham for living what Henry Hill would have called the goody-two-shoes life, and in a scene near the end, as Denham rides the subway home, we can see that the taunt stuck in his craw. Everyone at Belfort's firm seems to have the same title: "senior vice-president." Everybody wants to rule the world.

But the film's vision goes beyond cultural anthropology and antihero worship. When people ask me what the film is about, I tell them that like a good many films by Scorsese—who overcame a cocaine problem in the early '80s—at its root, it's about addiction: a disease or condition that seizes hold of one's emotions and imagination, and makes it hard to picture any life but the one you're already in. Many people get a contact high from following the exploits of entrepreneurs, financiers, bankers, CEO and the like, and when such men (they're nearly always men) get busted for skirting or breaking laws, they root for them as if they were disreputable folk heroes, gangsters with fountain pens instead of guns—guys who, for all their selfishness and cruelty, are above the petty rules that constrict the rest of us. Such men are addicts, egged on by a cheering section of little guys who fantasize of being big. We enable them by reveling in their exploits or not paying close enough attention to their misdeeds, much less demanding reform of the laws they bend or ignore—laws that might have teeth if we hadn't allowed guys like Belfort (and his far more powerful role models) to legally bribe the United States legislative branch via the nonsensical "system" of campaign financing. After a certain number of decades, we should ask if the nonstop enabling of addicts like Belfort doesn't mean that, in some sense, their enablers are addicted, too—that they (we) are part of a perpetual-motion wheel that just keeps turning and turning. In the end "Wolf" is not so much about one addict as it is about America's addiction to capitalist excess and the "He who dies with the most toys wins" mindset, which has proved as durable as the image of the snarling gangster taking what he likes when he feels like taking it. 

Scorsese and Winter aren't shy about drawing connections between Belfort's crew and the thugs in Scorsese's mob pictures. Those mob films are addiction stories, too.  "Wolf of Wall Street" showcases Belfort Henry Hill-style, as if he were an addict touring the wreckage of his life in order to confess and seek forgiveness; but like a lot of addicts, as Belfort recounts the disasters he narrowly escaped, the lies he told and the lives he ruined, you can feel the buzz in his voice and the adrenaline burning in his veins. You can tell he misses his old life of big deals and money laundering and decadent parties, just as Hill missed busting heads, jacking trucks, and doing enough cocaine to make Scarface's head explode. 

There will be a few points during "Wolf" when you think, "These people are revolting, why am I tolerating this, much less getting a vicarious thrill from it?" At those moments, think about what the "it" refers to. It's not just these characters, and this setting, and this particular story. It's the world we live in. Men like Belfort represent us, even as they're robbing us blind. They're America, and on some level we must be OK with them representing America, otherwise we would have seen reforms in the late '80s or '90s or '00s that made it harder for men like Belfort to amass a fortune, or that at least quickly detected and harshly punished their sins. Belfort was never punished on a level befitting the magnitude of pain he inflicted. According to federal prosecutors, he failed to abide by the terms of his 2003 restitution agreement. He's a motivational speaker now, and if you read interviews with him, or his memoir, it's obvious that he's not really sorry about anything but getting caught. We laugh at the movie, but guys like Belfort will never stop laughing at us. 

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film Credits

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

179 minutes

Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort

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Home / Essay Samples / Entertainment / Movie Review / Deconstructing the American Dream: A Wolf of Wall Street Analysis

Deconstructing the American Dream: A Wolf of Wall Street Analysis

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The Wolf Of Wall Street: ethics (essay)

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