JORDAN Belfort, a broker in 1990s New York, founded Stratton Oakmont after the 1987 market collapse and made excessive amounts of money through the disastrous losses of his clients.

At the tender age of 26, he earned 49 million dollars in a year...

Nothing could stop him. He left his first wife and married the model Naomi, who gave birth to two heirs of the financial regime.

An FBI investigation would crash down on Jordan, who stubbornly continued his disastrous climb to irredeemability.

Four substances would mark his downfall:

- Greed: cupidity, lust, gluttony; a desire to increase one's possessions; in economic terms, a fundamental component of capitalism;

- Hypersexuality: a psychological and behavioral disorder in which the individual experiences an obsessive pathological need for sexual intercourse or constant thoughts about sex. This dependency is similar to any drug addiction;

- Cocaine: a psychoactive substance that acts on the brain, affecting energy, memory, alertness, mood, and pleasure. The addiction, mistakenly thought to be only psychological, also has an important physical substrate linked to the neuroadaptation of the central nervous system to its effects. In addition to its excitatory nature, it causes exhaustion, fatigue, and lack of energy, pushing the user to repeat the drug intake to relive the well-being. This satisfaction is sought despite the primary importance of its reversible and irreversible psychological effects.

- Quaalude: its active ingredient, methaqualone, is a sedative-hypnotic drug that causes central nervous system depression. Illegally used as a recreational drug, it induces euphoria and drowsiness, increases sexual desire, and causes paresthesia. Overdosing can lead to delirium, convulsions, hypertonia, hyperreflexia, renal failure, and death through cardiac and respiratory arrest.

All this is seasoned with unstoppable vulgarity, a behavior continually offensive to good taste and manners; Jordan Belfort is an extremely crude, compulsive, incontinent, and obscene subject; at times grotesque, always irredeemably unstoppable.

It only took a few fools and losers to indoctrinate, teaching them to "shove stocks down clients' throats until they choke," to build a delirious cult of robbery brokerage followers.

Hiding the money in Switzerland with a frontwoman wouldn't be enough to throw off the FBI; the federal agent had promised him they would meet again, and the superbroker would have a different attitude.

A masterful film that describes the game of power: the rule of the mask and the necessity of the lie. The origin of this type of action lies in deep ignorance and madness.

Scorsese succeeds in portraying Jordan Belfort's narcissistic satisfaction of being the center of attention, under the spotlight, and somehow held up as an example or model, the higher the better, driven by the spasmodic and morbid need to see his followers as the realized embodiment of his desires. Nothing will ever fully satisfy the compulsivity of this condition, and the downward spiral of the jester and impostor will seem unstoppable.

180 minutes, an overdose of cinema from which it will fortunately be difficult to detox.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice