Belfort is from beginning to end the Everyday Man, the common folk, and unlike Gekko does not fall from the sky-- the result is meant to be unsettling--how pitiful and gaudy are Belfort's taste for extravaganza, that we are thus all in this ugly game--willy-nilly--and here Scorsese shares Stone's folkloric shrugging of the shoulder that there is something beastial in all of us humans--that Wall Street is the manifestation of the grain of greed, the dram of evil in everyone--the final shot of the film is framed deliberately to look like the very people sitting in the movie theater--there is thus a metaphysical determinism in the film, a predestinarian theology that leaves the Wall Street standing there like that iconic bull in the financial District--totemic, irresistible, unchanging--and THAT is precisely a conclusion that the whole world today is revolting against-- while the very maddening logic of capitalism, its insanity, has become "natural" in this cinema and the culture it represents

Hamid Dabashi - saw Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street"... Tuesday, January 7, 2014 @ 9:31pm