SHEEP IN WOLF’S CLOTHING
Martin Scorsese’s Wall Street drama ignores the economic crimes that matter most, writes David Olive
Now playing at a theatre near you is The Wolf of Wall Street, the real-life story of a piratic U.S. financier who fleeced investors of hundreds of millions of dollars in the 1990s. It’s worth seeing — superb storytelling by two cinema giants, director Martin Scorsese and a Leonardo DiCaprio in his acting prime.
That said, the film is practically irrelevant, not even a sideshow to the chronic rank mismanagement that ails business and the economy. And that, sad to say, is very much in the tradition of mainstream cinema.
Business is a minor film genre. The film industry has always believed that audiences find business arcane and boring. And those few mainstream business films that do get made typically aren’t instructive in how business and the economy really work.
Instead, Hollywood offers us the saga of Jordan Belfort, a small-time 1990s stock swindler based on Long Island who appointed himself the “Wolf of Wall Street” to flatter himself that he was a big wheel in Lower Manhattan, which he never would be.
Belfort was engaged in one of the most ancient, prosaic and common of small-scale crimes, namely sweettalking gullible investors into buying dubious penny stocks.
It’s called pump and dump. Highpressure telemarketers working out of a “boiler room” pump investors to load up on junk securities. They then dump their own inventory of the junk at the peak price to which they’ve driven it with the manic buying they’ve whipped up among suckers. The latter are then left holding wallpaper after the likes of Belfort have sold out, causing the price of the stock in the suckers’ hands to vaporize.
Crooks of this type were once so commonplace on Bay Street that in the 1960s, the securities industry drove them out of town, to the notorious former Vancouver Stock Exchange. Which doesn’t mean the Ontario Securities Commission isn’t to this day kept busy stripping the licences of boiler-room operations. They are so easy to set up that this small-bore crime has the staying power of cockroaches.
Why then does a filmmaker of Scorsese’s rare competence ( Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas) devote his late-career storytelling brilliance to such small fry?
The answer is that Belfort was larger than life, and then some. Which is to say, highly cinematic.
Belfort’s life story is one of hedonism and debauchery run riot. It’s a tale of elaborate staff revelries in gaudily opulent mansions, with prostitutes made available to employees already luxuriating in quick $100,000 commissions. Illicit drug use is rampant, of course.
Damaging business behaviour comes in many forms, many of them not remotely illegal. You’d never make a film about John Roth, for instance, who led a quiet family life while committing Nortel Networks Corp. to more than $30 billion worth of hasty, overpriced acquisitions that soon had to be written off. Today Roth lives on a tree farm in Caledon with his more than $100 million in stock-option proceeds from selling at the top of the market.
In Wolf, by contrast, Scorsese could not resist a cinematic Bacchanalia. Yet Scorsese is breaking no new ground here. Gordon Gekko put his girlfriend at his protégé’s disposal in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987). And the delight Belfort and his fellow miscreants take in skinning their “clients” alive is akin to the glee of the grain speculators in Chicago while Main Street Middle America lined up for scarce bread in D.W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat, brought to the screen 105 years ago. One thing Hollywood, Bollywood and the world’s other prodigious moviemaking centres do get right is public sentiment. And public sentiment worldwide is anti-business. Given that business topics occupy only a sliver of film offerings, the preponderance of films casting business in a bad light is all the more telling. A short list will do: It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) is the triumph of everyday people over an all-too-easily caricatured Mr. Potter, the heartless banker. Save the Tiger (1973) has a New York garment maker, unable to cope with rising costs, torching his factory — a foreshadowing of the off-shoring of North American factory jobs. Silkwood (1983) and Erin Brockovich (2000) pit whistleblowers against heinous, community-destroying businesses. Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) is an earlier telling of the Jordan Belfort-like story. In The Social Network (2010), Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg is a morally vacant grasper. Mark Ach- bar’s 2003 documentary, The Corporation, seemed over the top in labelling business leaders as “psychopaths.” But then came U.S. Congressional testimony seven years later revealing that some Wall Street CEOs quite possibly are a clinically diagnosable threat to society. What Hollywood will not depict in mainstream film are the economic crimes that matter most. Of course, they’re not “crimes” as such, since there’s no law against driving into the ground an enterprise or entire industry upon which millions of people and the entire economy are reliant. Audiences are presumed unable to sit still for business chicanery that threatens the economy, given that it unfolds in hushed boardrooms and largely unspoken assent to monumental knavery of epic destructiveness. Nortel’s fate was bereft of drama. Also the inexorable decline of General Motors Corp., whose demise would have destroyed a sizeable chunk of North America’s manufacturing prowess. And that’s also the story of the unrestrained greed behind the global financial meltdown of 2008-09, which triggered a Great Recession from which North America and Europe are still recovering. Yet filmdom will not subject to its fierce scrutiny the machinations of Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.; Charles Prince and former U.S. treasury secretary Robert Rubin at Citigroup Inc.; Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide Financial Inc.; Richard Fuld of Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc., and the clutch of others whose cupidity brought capitalism to its knees.
Hollywood may be a nest of liberals, but it won’t tell us the instructive stories of the true “malefactors of great wealth,” as Theodore Roosevelt condemned them, who brought about the widespread misery of the Great Recession. For that task, we have only the handful of excellent documentaries and docudramas that have appeared: Inside Job (2010), Margin Call and Too Big To Fail (both 2011), films that do not command large audiences.
So when you wonder why the perpetrators of hugely destructive economic damage and the widespread hardship that results get away with it, taking scores of millions of dollars in severance-pay rewards with them, consider that Jordan Belfort’s comparatively petty antics are of marquee interest, while that of the agents of cataclysmic economic damage are not. That helps explain why those occupying the commanding heights of the economy are not, by force of informed public will, required to make morality, prudence and common sense the operating principles of our global economy.