How “The Wolf of Wall Street” could have been a great movie

If you are considering watching “The Wolf of Wall Street”, you should do yourself a favor and read this article first. You just may save your self 3 hours of needless frustration.

“The Wolf of Wall Street” has no clear message. It flaunts it’s edginess with a brutishly raw depiction of true events following wall street scammer Jordan Belfort. Accordingly, the film includes an outrageous amount of lavish parties, sex, drugs, alcohol, shouting contests and the use of the f-word a record-breaking 544 times – the most ever featured in a fiction movie, according to Metro Magazine.

The movie was so obscene, sophomore Colby Ashurst, while watching the movie with some friends at Triangle Square, walked out only 30 min into the movie. “It wasn’t worth it for me” he says. “When I go see a movie I like learning something and I just didn’t see it getting any better from there.”

Everyone else who sat through the next 2 and a half hours would have been better off leaving the theater. There was nothing worth waiting for but an abrupt ending, with a weak conclusion, which was hardly long enough to make sense of the patchy story.

A strong conclusion is necessary for such a depraved movie to be worth the time and money it cost to see it. A good conclusion would have projected a redemptive quality to the scenes that where tough on the ears and the eyes.

The movie scarcely redeems itself in it’s conclusion, giving little to no evidence that Belfort had changed from the crack-smoking, thieving adulterer he was to a respectable man he is depicted to be in the final scene. “The Wolf of Wall Street” did not have a worthwhile message, if any, to justify it’s unorthodox use of obscenities.

The result is a disorganized mess of events which robs the viewers an adequate conclusion necessary of making sense of the story. The movie screams for attention, but does not know what it is trying to say. It has made a huge statement in pop culture, but an illegible one.

Since there is no clear message, viewers are forced to draw their own conclusions. Immature audiences could infer from the movie that it’s ok to treat your spouse with contempt or to live in a never-ending reckless pursuit of money and power. If the point of the movie was to say “do not do all the things Belfort did” then it did a sloppy job of saying so.

Writer Donald Miller, in his book “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years” stresses the importance of a good story. It can be inferred that the reason we like stories, is because we like to see conclusions. When we break it down, a story is a simple string of events, that are connected by a significant point, communicating a message. Unlike our own lives, which can seem pointless at times, in movies, we get to see other people’s lives mean something.

Even immoral characters can teach a moral lesson.  The demise of Walter White, in A&E’s “Breaking Bad” for example, asserts that bad decisions affect everyone.

The story of Jordan Belfort, on the other hand,  is inconclusive. It tells us a bad story without a redemptive message to make the story worthwhile.