7. Greed Really Isn't Good - The Wolf Of Wall Street
If you thought Gordon Gekko was bad, wait until you see Jordan Belfort. Like his fictional counterpart, Belfort isn't above twisting the law to make a little more dough, although that's really only the tip of The Wolf Of Wall Street's hedonism. Belfort's Stratton Oakmont is home to raucous parties and institutionalised lying, while his private life involves so many drugs the film's production probably marked a significant boon in the icing sugar business. The film runs for 180 minutes and much of that time is spent in comedy mode, with extended sequences showing Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill act high. This probably played a part in making many mainstream critics dismiss the film as simply revelling in the luxurious lifestyles of its protagonist, a three hour drool over piles of cash. To view The Wolf Of Wall Street as that, however, misses the amount of emotional strife everyone's put through; the final act sees Belfort become an unstable, wife-beating rapist. As with Goodfellas and Casino before it, Martin Scorsese is showing the allure of the lifestyle, getting you wrapped in before revealing it's major downsides. That it's more extreme than those films only goes to show how much more extreme the world of banking is; starting only a couple of years after Goodfellas ended, the bankers make gangsters look well behaved.
