The movie is based on the memoir of a rise-to-the-top, then destruct, Wall Street success story of the 1980s. The drug use, vile language, explicit and over the top sex and insanely out of control life styles are portrayed in an appropriate way for the story. People, real people, have become commodities, a cash crop of sorts for these Wall Street success stories.
I liked the movie, a lot. Scorese tells the story very graphically. He doesn't moralize. The viewer can do the moralizing. The story brings the audience along so that we realize the people got sucked in and while on that ride the moral aspects of it bacome irrelevant. The viewer is forced to ask himself...when would I say no to that ride? Were those being exploited part of it, since the first ingredient to being exploited is greed? (these are questions I ask, Scorese doesn't ask them for us)
It's not pro or anti capitalism. It tells the story, a true one, of greed and excess. Nobody walked out of the theater I was in. Everybody seemed absorbed. I give the movie four stories because it makes us think about greed and excess, those things that are still destroying our excuse of a civilization today.
Exactly my point.
See #36. That comment was meant for you.