- Also Known As:
- Unknown
- Year:
- 2013
- Country:
- Predominant Genre:
- Comedy
- Director:
- Outstanding Performance:
- Premiss:
- The rise to wealth of a stock-broker: From living the high life to his fall involving crime, corruption and the federal government.
- Themes:
- Alienation | Destiny | Emotional repression | Identity | Justice | Loneliness | Loyalty | Materialism | Narcissism | Personal | Political |
Self-expression | Sex | Sexism | Sexual Repression | Social class | Snobbery | Solipsism | Stereotyping | White culture | White guilt | White supremacy - Similar to:
- Review Format:
- DVD
Money Makes You a Better Person
Extravagantly-funny movie about the kind of White greed that helped create the current global economic problems.
The usual White preoccupations with Sex & Drugs & Rock‘n’Roll are well to the fore here, as Whites try to escape the bounds of a reality they reject - particularly the
That stockbroking is something of a con-game in which only stockbrokers are likely to make any real money is rather obvious since they would never offer investment tips to their clients, if the tips were good - they would invest in the companies they recommend themselves and get rich that way. In reality, of course, stockbrokers make money from sales’ commissions which are not based on whether or not the stock market is bullish or bearish. Wall Street money is a fantasy, its salesmen crooked soldiers and its clients idiots, is as hilarious as it is accurate. There is a clear sense here that the movie is actually more of an expose of Hollywood than of Wall Street.
Getting rich by neither production nor creation is false wealth since stockbrokers then have to ensure their clients do not cash in on their earnings/winnings by buying more equity in the hope of getting even richer. But the wealth is only on paper until it is cashed - a cashing that can only negatively-impact on the stockbrokers wealth. Thus, a psychological battle surrounding paper wealth ensues in which paper wealth chases even more paper wealth until a stock or stocks fails; making such trades a form of legalized gambling.
It is this gambling aspect to this story that fully expresses the reality of the White American Dream. The land of opportunity turns out to be little more than a myth concerning the
White emotional-repression alternates and conflicts with the need for emotional expression through sexual release that can only find pseudo-resolution in fiscal greed. The relationship between sex and money in the White world is well-shown here as sex is frequently with prostitutes and naked bodies are shown on beds covered in Dollar bills - income hidden from the IRS by being in cash. Sexual activity here is like going to the toilet: More of a need than a pleasure. And, in the end, as in A Clockwork Orange, the central character is never redeemed; making this a
DiCAPRIO still cannot act nor inhabit a character, yet this makes him a good fit for the superficial and materialistic anti-hero whose soul we never truly glimpse; leaving us with the realization that he does not really have one. The other actors do the best they can with a script that is more concerned with ideas expressed humorously than with actual people. Yet the film grips precisely because of the importance of those ideas to ordinary people - everywhere.
Getting rich quick was never this much fun.
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