Some have pointed out (I think I sort of did earlier, actually) that both Henry Hill and Jordan Belfort come from “humble beginnings” before becoming hardened criminals hell-bent on preserving their power and wealth. But there’s a key line spoken by Kyle Chandler as FBI Agent Denham in my favorite scene of The Wolf of Wall Street, amidst the macho posturing and passive-aggressive attempts by Denham and Belfort to make the other underestimate them. He points out to Jordan that other criminals he’s investigated in the past had bad upbringings of some kind, but Jordan Belfort didn’t. He got to be the douchebag he is all by himself.
He could just as well be talking about Henry Hill, who was born into a neighborhood where the men who were free to do as they please were part of the mob scene, which was a welcome reprieve from his blue-collar upbringing. Jordan Belfort’s parents were accountants in Queens; he went to American University where he graduated with a degree in biology. He presumably was not born into a family motivated to get rich at all costs, but adopted these values somewhere along the way, likely during his time at his first firm, L.F. Rothschild. His progression to becoming a broker with utter contempt for his investors and a sole focus on making billions of dollars was something he learned from the first boss he had on Wall Street, but what drove him to Wall Street was surely something that had been in him all along, albeit less specific than Henry Hill’s gangster aspirations.
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Published: Jan 8, 2014 10:00 am