If there’s one vital distinction between the outcomes of the two stories looked at here, if there’s one takeaway a person can make from considering the clear comparison Scorsese and company are trying to make between these two characters, it’s that Henry Hill suffers some consequences for his actions, and Jordan Belfort ultimately gets off virtually scot-free. Their trajectories up to this point are relatively similar: both men reach a certain height of wealth and prosperity and influence, only to become targets of legal investigations and in the process lose their families and community of friends through some form of betrayal.
They both rat out their colleagues and they’re both offered deals by law enforcement. Hill is far more cooperative though, since Belfort reneges on his deal to incriminate Donnie. But while Henry is exiled in suburbia as part of the Witness Protection Program, sentenced to living his life like a schnook and longing to matter again, Jordan realizes that if you’re rich enough in America today, you don’t really pay a price for committing egregious crimes, but can serve 22 months in a luxurious “prison” and proceed to make millions of dollars through speaking fees and book deals (especially if those books get turned into movies).
Goodfellas leaves us shaking our heads at the foolishness of Henry’s desire to continue on as a gangster—the gunshot toward the camera seems like the way he feels he should have gone—but The Wolf of Wall Street is intended, I think, to leave you with a kind of impotent rage at the culture it depicts and a society that is either powerless to or uninterested in harness in any way. The message is almost that if an update to Goodfellas were to be made, Goodfellas 2013, it would consist of today’s criminals fleecing the little guy, in the form of Wall Street, having their fun and, if they’re powerful enough, facing absolutely no consequences whatsoever. If The Wolf of Wall Street is glorifying anything, it’s a past where we were innocent enough to actually expect our criminals to face any form of justice for their offenses.
