Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street: Where bankers are the new gangsters

Scorsese's new film is the most extravagant example yet of a thriller where the villains are white-collar money-men

Age of innocence: (from left) Margot Robbie, Leonardo DiCaprio,and Martin Scorsese on the set on ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ (Paramount)

Martin Scorsese used to make films about gangsters. Now, he has turned to stockbrokers and bankers instead. Not that there seems to be much difference. The Wolf of Wall Street tells the story of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), a real-life character so sleazy, shameless and outrageous he makes Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill in Scorsese’s Goodfellas seem a little prim.

Belfort’s memoir (on which Scorsese’s film is based) is notable for its utterly unapologetic tone. The stockbroker and founder of “pump and dump” Long Island firm Stratton Oakmont made his staff very rich indeed but, as CNN recently reported, the firm is estimated to have “cheated” individual investors out of $250m “by the time regulators managed to close it in 1996”.

In his book, Belfort chronicles with enormous relish his drug taking, his sex life (his constant cheating on his wife with prostitutes), and the midget-throwing competitions his colleagues (the “Strattonites”) used to stage on Friday afternoons. Above all, he talks about his money making. This was the Gordon Gekko era and Belfort has freely admitted that “greed is good” was his credo too.

After his arrest for securities fraud and money laundering, Belfort spent 22 months in jail. Behind bars, he hatched the idea for his book, using Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities to teach himself how to write. Even before its publication, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt were competing for the movie rights.

The reason leading Hollywood stars were so keen on The Wolf of Wall Street certainly wasn’t because it was a modern-day morality fable about a sinner who had seen the light. Nor were they interested in making a film about the inner workings of a business based on telephone salespeople in remotest Long Island, cold calling customers and convincing them to buy stocks that will soon be worthless. The attraction was in Belfort himself, his meteoric rise and spectacular fall.

Belfort isn’t exactly a Jay Gatsby of his era, even if his company is based in Long Island (the setting of much of The Great Gatsby). He has Gatsby’s taste for parties, though, and much of his reckless hedonism. He too is a self-made man who came from nowhere to extreme wealth.

“This movie epitomises the corruption of the American dream, and it’s done with a great sense of sadistic humour,” DiCaprio recently told The Wall Street Journal. That’s what critics used to say about gangster movies as well – they were the dark side of the American dream.

In his influential 1948 essay, The Gangster as Tragic Hero (often cited by Scorsese), Robert Warshow wrote about the gangster (on screen) as, “the man of the city, with the city’s language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring”. Warshow drew a distinction between the brutality of the movie gangster, with “the unlimited possibility of aggression”, and movie presentations of businessmen. The latter “tend to make it appear that they [businessmen] achieve their success by talking on the telephone and holding conferences and that success is talking on the phone and holding conferences”.

In modern Hollywood, the distinction between gangsters and businessmen is blurring fast. This isn’t just because of the distrust in which so many bankers are held following the 2008 crash, the Bernie Madoff scandal, the collapse of Lehman Brothers etc. Now, the brutality, aggression and cunning which Warshow associated with gangsters is also found in a new generation of Wall Street anti-heroes on screen. Film-makers are increasingly turning their attention to white-collar crime. That, after all, is where the real profits seem to be made. Heist movies and gangster epics are all very well but crooked financiers on Wall Street, laundering money or running Ponzi schemes, are now the villains (and anti-heroes) of choice. It is no coincidence that the screenplay for The Wolf of Wall Street was written by Terence Winter, who is best known as the creator of HBO’s Prohibition-era mobster drama Boardwalk Empire.

Scorsese’s movie is the most extravagant entry in what now constitutes a mini-genre – thrillers in which gangsters have been displaced by bankers. In Boiler Room (2000), a film also partially inspired by Belfort’s story, the twentysomething “stockjocks” at a Stratton Oakmont-like brokerage firm selling to unsuspecting buyers shows the swagger and aggressiveness of young urban warriors on the make in mobster movies. The boiler-room boys also have all the trappings of young gangsters – the sports cars, luxury mansions and improbably glamorous girlfriends.

More recently, Nicholas Jarecki’s Arbitrage (2012) portrayed a New York hedge-fund magnate Robert Miller (Richard Gere) who likewise behaves like a mob-family patriarch. Miller is shown as taking his family life and civic responsibilities extremely seriously, even as he is swindling clients, blackmailing his enemies and trying to cover up his illicit affairs.

JC Chandor’s Margin Call (2011) was a cautionary tale about an investment bank desperately trying to cope with toxic assets and a plunging balance sheet during the financial crisis. In Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine (2013), Alec Baldwin plays a Manhattan businessman who behaves like a more charismatic version of Bernie Madoff. He doesn’t use guns or physical intimidation, just steals shamelessly from his clients.

Alongside these fictional dramas, there has been a spate of documentaries about corruption in the financial sector, among them Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job and Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story.

It is striking how admiringly Jordan Belfort talks of Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street (1987.) Just as real-life gangsters in an earlier era often based their behaviour on that of Hollywood prototypes, a new generation of crooked financiers are taking inspiration from Wolfe and Stone.

Having made an initial fortune through his “boiler room” brokerage, Belfort now has a blossoming second career as an author and motivational speaker. This is largely based on his reminiscing about his own earlier misdeeds. Scorsese’s film is bound to boost his notoriety yet further. As Belfort’s stock rises yet further, the plight of all those investors who lost their savings because of Stratton Oakmont is bound to be ignored. Then again, nobody paid much attention to the victims in gangster stories either.

‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ is due for release in the US on 25 December and in the UK on 17 January