Paramount Pictures has debuted the trailer for Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. We love the appearance of Leonardo in it look’s mean and a wolf indeed.
Stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Matthew McConaughey, Jon Favreau, Kyle Chandler, Rob Reiner, Jean Dujardin, Pj Byrne, and Kenneth Choi.
Based on Jordan Belfort’s best-selling memoir, Belfort’s dramatic rise and fall on Wall Street, along with his hard-partying lifestyle and tumultuous personal life, which included drug and alcohol addiction.
In The Wolf of Wall Street, the comedic high point is a drug overdose. In a voiceover, Wall Street con man Jordan Belfort jokes that he’s bypassing the usual stage of a Quaalude high—drooling—and going straight to seizures instead. Jordan, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, drags his contorted body to the steps of his country club, rolls himself down the brick stairs, and struggles into his Lamborghini so he can drive home.
Critics have approached The Wolf of Wall Street, which is based on the memoirs of the real-life Jordan Belfort, with mixed reactions, some saying it glorifies the vices it shows, others saying it’s obvious that the film is not endorsing greed and addiction, and still, others saying the message isn’t too clear. Many have criticized the film for not showing the victims of Belfort’s dishonest financial schemes, but few have noted the victims of his drug and alcohol addiction, too.
Related: Top 5 Financial Lessons from The Wolf of Wall Street
If the message is “drugs are bad,” some people aren’t getting the message and it is a very confusing message altogether.
In Business Insider, Steven Perlberg wrote that he was shocked by the audience’s reaction when he watched the film with a Wall Street crowd: “Belfort’s decadence was disturbing, but equally disturbing was the…gleeful reaction to his behavior and legal wrongdoings.” Perlberg said the audience cheered when Belfort “rips up a couch cushion to get to his secret coke stash” and cheered even louder when Belfort “dumps coke into his nose” to remedy his Quaalude overdose.
The Wolf of Wall Street doesn’t show Belfort’s financial victims and doesn’t even bother to show any people endangered by his driving or piloting while high—but in one scene we see a victim of his addiction. After a relapse into cocaine use, Jordan grabs his toddler daughter, shoves her in his car, and crashes the car before he even leaves the garage. The terror and the fear of his daughter’s face give a glimpse of the damage his addiction is causing. This is a must watch movie regardless of its portrayal of real-life events.
