Movie Review: The Wolf of Wall Street (content warning: descriptions of sex and drug use)

November 20, 2021

I admit, I was on the fence a lot before seeing this film. I tend to be squeamish about violence and sex, so I looked at the Kids in Mind review for any explicit content that the movie showed (in terms of sex, violence, and language, Kids in Mind rated it a 10.4.10, meaning that this film contained a lot of graphic sex and enough language to warrant any parent to cover their child’s ears.) But I think it helped learning about the explicit content beforehand, because then I felt a little more prepared for what to expect. I was still pretty dizzy after the film because it was definitely a wild ride, but reading the Kids in Mind review helped me get through the movie.

And that’s not to say this is a film for everybody. I thought it wasn’t going to be a film for me, so I thought, “I’m not going to have the stomach to see this.” But then I remembered how much I love dark comedies, and The Wolf of Wall Street is a dark comedy. After watching dark comedies like I, Tonya; Parasite; and Zola, I have more appreciation for the genre. Even though dark comedies are called comedies, I think like any movie they give some pretty serious insight into the human condition and show us in a bare-bones way just as we are, in all our imperfections and fallibility. Also, I’ve been on a biopics kick lately, so I’ve been watching a lot of biographical films. The last one I saw was The Runaways, which is based on musician Cherie Currie’s memoir about her time in Joan Jett’s band The Runaways.

As much as I want to re-watch the film (in college, I treated films as texts so I ended up watching movies for my classes at least 4-5 times no matter how intense the film was. Probably not the wisest strategy since I’m sensitive about content and thus ended up being consumed emotionally by these films, but that’s beside the point.) I need a bit of a break from it because it packed a lot of content into three hours. I didn’t realize this until halfway through the film, but the first 3 hour Leonardo DiCaprio film I saw was Titanic (not the first Leonardo film, though; before that, I saw Inception), and that was 3 hr 17 min long. I made the mistake of watching that at night and at 1 am I was a mess of snot and tissues and tears. The Wolf of Wall Street is almost 3 hours long, too. I thought I would be better off watching this movie in small parts throughout the week because of its length, and because I had other things to do on my schedule, but once I watched it I was so enthralled with the acting, in particular the way Leonardo DiCaprio embodies the character of Jordan Belfort, and the storyline, that I just couldn’t stop watching. Watching this movie made me realize how much I missed watching Leonardo’s acting. He was of course, as anyone who saw Titanic knows, ah-mazing, and in this one he seriously brings his acting chops, too. So I ended up staying up late watching the film until about 11 pm. I had work the next day and was pretty tired, but then I still had thirty minutes left of the movie to watch the next morning, so I finished it before work, and dang I couldn’t stop thinking about that movie for the rest of the day.

So honestly, when I first saw the film I was pretty much duped. At the beginning they play a commercial for a brokerage house in New York City called Stratton-Oakmont, and because I didn’t really read much about the movie before watching it, I was confused because I bought the film on Google Play, and they usually don’t play commercials or trailers before the movie. They only played commercials and trailers for other movies on the DVD version of films I watched, or if I watch the movie in the theater. So I thought it was a brokerage firm advertising for the movie, but then the next scene immediately cut to Leonardo’s character Jordan Belfort and the other people at the firm throwing a short person for target practice at a dart board and yelling and cheering, and then I realized, Oh wow, I thought that was an actual commercial (I’m sure it was though, because this is based on the memoir by Jordan Belfort and Stratton-Oakmont was an actual brokerage house in Long Island, New York). The film starts off with him telling how he ended up becoming so rich and powerful, and shows him snorting cocaine from a woman’s backside. He started off with a pretty humble childhood, and then in his early 20s he worked for a brokerage firm. In his meeting with Matthew McConaughey’s character Mark Hanna, meets with him for lunch and Mark talks him through the business of working on Wall Street. He essentially tells him that it’s a dog-eat-dog kind of environment, and in order to survive he needs to push aside any kind of empathy or compassion, and not care about clients and just focus on making money from other people. Unfortunately, the stocks fail on Jordan’s first day at the firm, LF Rothschild, on a day called Black Monday, and he loses his job. He and his wife Teresa look through the ads in the newspaper, and at first he thinks of taking a job in an entry-level position at a department store and just work his way up, but Teresa tells him it won’t make ends meet and has him apply for something else. She points to an ad for working on Wall Street, and he ends up going to apply for another firm. At first, he is surprised by the more laid-back attitude of the employees, not to mention the smaller size of the firm, which was a total contrast to the LF Rothschild environment, which was more fast-paced and less relaxed. Also, the shares and stocks they sell are way less than what they sold at LF Rothschild. On the first day of him working there, Jordan shows them that he can outsell any of them on the phone calls, and everyone is impressed, so they raise his paycheck. While eating at a diner, a guy named Donnie Azoff (the last movie I saw Jonah Hill in was Megamind. He was the voice of Hal, who becomes Megamind’s archnemesis. So up til then I hadn’t seen him in any other movies, but in his role as Donnie, oh my gosh he was such a good actor. It really gave me more respect for his acting.) approaches Jordan and asks him how much he makes working at the brokerage firm. When Jordan tells him he makes $70,000 in one day, Donnie’s eyes light up and he asks if Jordan can find him a job because he’s working at a furniture store and barely making ends meet. So he and Donnie team up and gather a few more guys and they establish a brokerage house called Stratton-Oakmont. Pretty soon the firm grows in success, and with it Jordan’s ego. He ends up spending lots of money and upgrades his humble lifestyle to a lavish lifestyle of booze, yachts, drugs, and sex with various women outside his marriage to his new wife, Naomi, who he meets at one of Stratton-Oakmont’s lavish parties (Theresa stands outside after she finds out Jordan cheated on her with Naomi, and calls off their marriage.) Jordan thinks he will find bliss in marrying Naomi and buys her an expensive wedding ring and has a nice wedding ceremony. However, eighteen months later, we see her splashing him with water and cussing him out because he brought home a prostitute and slept with her, even though he is married and has kids. However, she stays in their marriage even when he does all these horrible things. Jordan’s activities get more and more corrupt, and we see the Federal Bureau Investigation agency tracking his activities. Eventually, he gets caught, and has to announce to his firm that he is ending the company. Again, I was duped, but not totally because I still was only halfway through this 3 hour film, and I thought to myself, is it over? and then realized, no there’s still another storyline to this. And sure enough, Jordan basically tells everyone, “Nah, I was just messing with you, I’m staying, I’m not leaving.” His dad, who warned him that he was not only spending extravagantly, but also that the FBI was going to be on his case for a long time until he turned himself in and stopped his criminal activities for good, warns him that he can’t simply change his mind like that and that there will be consequences for what he did. However, no one can hear his warning because Jordan is beating his chest and humming just like Mark Hanna taught him to do when they had that lunch together early in the film, and everyone, because they think Jordan is God, follows his lead and starts beating their chest and humming, too.

We then see them on a yacht partying to “Hip Hip Hooray” by Naughty by Nature. However, Jordan is also seen with a Swiss broker trying to get them to smuggle all the money he illegally obtained there so he and the people at his firm don’t get caught. It’s sad because on the yacht in Italy, where they aren’t going to get caught, Naomi comes up to the yacht with her friend crying because her Aunt Emma died. Even though they have to go to the funeral in London, Jordan refuses and insists on taking the money to Geneva and sticking with his plan to go there, totally forgetting that he has a family member that just died. To him, it doesn’t matter that Aunt Emma died, but rather than her money is in the bank and he needs to get it out so that the FBI doesn’t catch him. The FBI finally tracks him down, and he is under house arrest for all the crimes he committed while Stratton-Oakmont was in business. He can’t drink, he can’t do drugs, he is undergoing withdrawal for his addiction to drugs and it’s painful for him. However, Donny visits him and tells him he’s got Jordan’s back no matter what. Then, while Jordan is telling Naomi his plan for the money he’s smuggled illegally, Naomi says she wants to file for divorce. He then gets angry and she slaps him and he slaps her back, and he rips up the sofa and gets out his stash of cocaine and breaks his sobriety from drugs by snorting the cocaine furiously. He gets angry when Naomi tells him she is keeping custody of their kids, and he refuses to let her take custody, and he grabs his daughter and takes her in his car and drives off. Naomi and her housekeeper retrieve his daughter from the car and Jordan, high behind the wheel, is bleeding on his forehead from the force of the crash after he backs into a brick.

Jordan and the people at Stratton-Oakmont end up getting arrested and Jordan ends up teaching a class on sales. He tests people on their knowledge of sales by having them pretend to sell him a pen, and when they’re not quick enough, he cuts them off and goes to the next person to see if they can do what he asked. When the movie ended, I had no words.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to write the review for this movie because there was a lot to digest while watching the movie. However, I think studying more about Buddhist philosophy and reading The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin has given me insight into the human condition just as movies give insight into the human condition. One reason I love philosophy is because it gets to the root of why people do the things they do, and after chanting daimoku about how to best approach this review, I found some things to write about with regards to this movie. I think the early part of the movie, where Jordan is just starting out at the firm, gives context for why he did what he did. I was watching the movie 42 and there’s a young white boy who watches his dad call Jackie Robinson the n-word and at first he doesn’t know how to react but then because he sees his dad do it, he thinks it’s ok and ends up calling Jackie the n-word, too. I told my professor allowed that I was horrified when that scene happened, and he woke me up to the fact that kids are not born racist, they are taught to be racist. Similarly, Jordan wasn’t born a corrupt person who engaged in debauchery of all kinds. He encountered Mark Hanna, who taught him the philosophy of competitiveness. No one gave Jordan an alternative to that philosophy. During the meeting, even little things in Mark’s behavior indicate how Jordan was influenced for the rest of the film. Mark asks for alcohol and offers Jordan some, but instead Jordan asks the waiter for water. Instead of respecting Jordan’s wish, Mark jokingly tells the waiter that Jordan is just starting out in the business and that he’ll “catch up” and learn how to act like everyone on Wall Street. When Jordan asks him about how to care for the clients, Mark tells him that he doesn’t care about the clients, and that the only thing that matters is making money off of them. He also tells him that if he gets stressed he needs to find time to “jerk off”, even though Jordan is married and happy with his marriage. This broker tells him that to work his way up the ladder, he needs to tear people down and make them feel small, and he sees this in his first day working on Wall Street. He sees people shouting over the phone and swearing, and he internalizes this. The work environment is based on the life condition of animality, which is one of the ten life states, or Ten Worlds, that we can manifest any time in our daily lives. Animality is a life condition wherethe strong prey on the weak and take advantage of them. Jordan was young and didn’t know much about working on Wall Street; he just wanted to be reasonably happy. But Mark Hanna instilled in him this idea that he wouldn’t make it in Wall Street unless he succumbed to that life state of animality.

At first it was easy for me to conclude from The Wolf of Wall Street that money is the root of all evil. But I thought about it from a Buddhist perspective, and we have a concept called value creation, which means that even in the most stressful situations, everything has meaning. The philosophy of value creation reminded me time and again that humans create institutions, and just as we use them for evil, we can also use them to create good. In real life, Leonardo is a philanthropist. He has all this money but even though he is rich he donates a lot of his money to environmental causes and has a foundation dedicated to environmental issues. Just as human beings established slavery, they established investing, Wall Street, money in general. As the film progressed, I reflected on the purpose of money: what does it serve? what determines our use of money? what is its fundamental purpose? And it’s interesting because there’s a scene early in the film where Jordan is talking with his friends about starting the brokerage house, and they’re talking about how everyone wants money and one person in the group says that Buddhists are an exception because they don’t care about money. I was kind of happy they mentioned Buddhists, like “yo shoutout to my religion!” haha. But it’s actually interesting they mentioned that, because this week I was reading this article in the April 2021 issue of the publication I read called Living Buddhism, and there’s an article called “Becoming People of True Wealth.” According to the article, “Buddhism teaches that money is neither inherently good nor bad, but it can take on good or bad qualities depending on how we use it…Conventional wisdom holds that praying for something like having a better job or a bigger house runs counter to religious values, but Buddhism views life from a deeper dimension. The Buddhist principle “earthly desires are enlightenment” explains that the Buddha’s enlightened wisdom can be found in the lives of ordinary people who are driven by their earthly desires, or deluded impulses. We can chant to the Gohonzon and express our desires just as they are. And as we do so, we tap into our inherent Buddha nature, which manifests as compassion, wisdom and courage that gradually transform all our desires into the fuel for developing a richer, happier and more fulfilling life.” (p. 16-19, “Becoming People of True Wealth,” April 2021 Living Buddhism)

It’s interesting that I chose to watch this movie, The Wolf of Wall Street, because a couple of weeks ago I applied to a job on Wall Street because I wasn’t really sure what else to do with my life and didn’t think I could find a job in my creative field. I got rejected and felt sad about it, but moved on. The Wolf of Wall Street made me reflect on my 20s and my attitudes towards money: is money a tool to help people or a way to validate my worth? I have been studying The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin, and there’s a letter called “On Attaining Buddhahood in this Lifetime,” and in the letter Nichiren Daishonin tells his follower Nanjo Tokimitsu that while everything and everyone has Buddhahood, he needs to summon up faith that “Nam myoho renge kyo” is his life itself, and that he must not seek enlightenment outside himself. I chanted about this and thought about it more the more I studied this letter, and then I watched The Wolf of Wall Street, and it reminded me that no matter how successful I get, I need to win over my own self in order to feel like I’ve truly won in life. In his book Discussions on Youth, the philosopher Daisaku Ikeda has this incredibly beautiful quote where he says that winning isn’t necessarily about becoming rich or becoming important, and that a lot of people who became rich or important ended up leading corrupt lives and didn’t actually win over themselves. He also said we shouldn’t compare ourselves to others because each of us is unique in our own way based on the Buddhist principle of “cherry, plum, peach, damson.” While of course I may be reading too deeply into the movie (after all, it is a comedy, albeit a dark comedy), from a Buddhist perspective, I just feel that Jordan in the film ended up doing the things he did because no one taught him that success lies within himself, and that he could lead a successful life just as he was. Someone else told him that to be successful, all he had to care about was money. Jordan felt that he had to look outside himself for respect, for validation, and couldn’t tap into that respect in his own life.

One scene that really stuck with me was when Jordan and Donny get high on lemon quaaludes, which the most potent quaalude they have. At first nothing is working and they’re not getting high, so they pop more of those quaaludes. Later on, when Jordan is on the phone, he suddenly experiences paralysis of his body and loses all consciousness when the effects of taking so many quaaludes at once hits him. He struggles down the stairs, and honestly, this was the hardest scene to watch because he is literally fighting for his life against the effects of this drug. He slurs his words on the phone and no one can understand him. He gets in his car and his wife calls him and he can’t communicate coherently, and gets in the car and just starts breaking down. When he gets to the house, Donny is also slurring his words high on the quaaludes and also cannot function, and ends up choking on his food. Naomi, who is very pregnant, has to call for help and even though she tells Jordan to help him he can’t understand her because he’s high on the quaaludes. He manages to resuscitate Donny, but ends up feeling miserable on the couch after taking these drugs. It reminded me of a scene from Uncut Gems, when Howard is struggling to pay off his debts from gambling. His girlfriend tries to cheer him up, but he breaks down and cries and tells her that he can’t do anything right and that everyone is after him. Howard was in a life state of hell, which is a life state where everything feels hopeless and you’re swayed by everything in your environment and feel like you can’t do anything about what’s happening to you. Similarly, Jordan feels like he can’t do anything about his situation, and even though he keeps running away from the FBI he still owes a lot of money to the people he and Stratton-Oakmont scammed.

After watching this movie, I reflected on this chapter I read in Discussions on Youth called “What is Freedom?” and even though at times I thought to myself if the point of life and success was to live a lavish lifestyle (not that there’s anything wrong with wanting nice things, of course), reading this chapter made me understand that true freedom doesn’t necessarily depend on our circumstances or how well things go in our lives, but rather on our inner state of life, or what we call in Buddhism our “life condition.” Even though Jordan did as he pleased, he was always at the mercy of his environment. He struggled with what we call in Buddhism fundamental ignorance, or fundamental darkness, which is this inability to see our inner potential, the courage, wisdom, and compassion we each inherently possess in our lives. He did these corrupt things because he couldn’t see his own innate Buddhahood. We have a principle in Buddhism called respect for the inherent dignity of life, and while watching Jordan and his friends tear down people at the firm and degrade their humanity, I thought that because they didn’t respect the inherent dignity of their lives they couldn’t respect the inherent dignity of other people’s lives. It reminded me that my success, no matter how much money I make, I need to respect my life, and while I love money like everyone else, and appreciate nice things, if I don’t keep growing as a person I get complacent with my success and stop appreciating the people around me, and eventually I get stagnant and stop truly winning in my life because of this reluctance to keep growing and maintain a sense of appreciation for my life and others’ lives.

Here is the trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street:

The Wolf of Wall Street. 2013. Rated R for sequences of strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language throughout, and for some violence.