Tucked behind the Goldman Sachs building at 200 West Street, the Regal Battery Park theater was a fitting venue for last night's free advanced screening of "The Wolf of Wall Street," Martin Scorsese's highly-anticipated biopic
about '90s-era pump-and-dump charlatan Jordan Belfort. Belfort's
decadence was disturbing, but equally disturbing was the finance-heavy
audience's gleeful reaction to his behavior and legal wrongdoings.
Credit Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, who played Belfort,
for keeping the high-octane, drug-filled movie entertaining for three
hours (the longest Scorsese film by about 60 seconds).
But my one major gripe was pretty simple: Jordan Belfort defrauded a
lot of people—and by the nature of his penny stock transgressions, many
low-income people—out of a ton of money. He then used that money, as one
does, on cocaine, hookers, cars, and yachts. It may be great cinema to
document his exploits, but there's a fine line between satirizing Wall
Street's excess and celebrating Belfort's lifestyle.
No comments:
Post a Comment