One suspects that the lead characters in Boiler Room would love The Wolf of Wall Street. Martin Scorsese’s three-hour epic about greed, drugs, and sex premiered to a plethora of reactions in 2017, ranging from trenchant admiration to vigorous objection. The film was either praised as a fearless satire of excess or condemned as a glorification of it, both interpretations stemming less from the film’s content than the perspective by which it’s told. The truth is, Jordan Belfort is a sleazy conman who ran an off-exchange brokerage firm in Long Island, far from the bustling streets of Lower Manhattan. He’s as much the “Wolf of Wall Street” as Jimmy John’s is the purveyor of the “World’s Best Sandwiches,” which is to say, he’s not. Belfort didn’t work on Wall Street, he just pretended he did.
The young “brokers” at J.T. Marlin, Boiler Room’s simulacrum for Belfort’s Stratton Oakmont, also pretend they work on Wall Street. Films provide a reference, as well as a gateway for that fantasy. “Have you ever seen Glengarry Glen Ross?” asks the straight-faced Ben Weinstein (Nicky Katt), a senior broker, to his new trainee Seth (Giovanni Ribisi) on his first day on the floor, “always be closing.” The reference is laughably direct, an essential element of writer-director Ben Younger’s overall design. Just a few scenes earlier, Seth, a bright but misdirected college dropout, attends a group interview (or as he narrates, “a Hitler Youth rally”), where square-jawed recruiter Jim Young (Ben Affleck) does his best Alec Baldwin impression in an effort to impress new recruits. “They say money can’t buy happiness? Look at the f**cking smile on my face. Ear to ear, baby,” he touts. Like the non-existent stocks that J.T. Marlin inflates and sells, it’s all words and appearances. If you look the part, you are the part. If you know the lines, you become the architect of your own reality.
In many ways, Boiler Room is a product of its time. It was released in 2000 to middling reviews (Roger Ebert was amongst the film’s most high-profile critical champions) and has mostly vanished from the public discourse since. Every shot is filtered through that distinct blue hue that pervaded so many movies of the early aughts, giving the film an ugly, desaturated look that feels as cold as the world its characters inhabit. Visuals aside, its hip hop/R&B-influenced score, composed by electronic artist The Angel, doesn’t sound all too dissimilar from that one “You Wouldn’t Steal a Car” anti-piracy ad preceding DVDs in the early-to-mid- 2000s. Perversely though, the dated aesthetic mostly serves to embolden Boiler Room’s authenticity, granting it an uncool coolness in line with the bland artifice Mary Harron’s American Psycho would so aptly satirize from 1980s Wall Street that same year. Younger sets the tone in an intentionally cringe-inducing fashion with the film’s glorious opening line: “I went the white boy way of slinging crack-rock: I became a stockbroker.”
Yet Boiler Room isn’t a satire, it’s a drama of disillusionment. Through Seth (Ribisi), the film explores how a young man’s concerted but childish efforts to gain respect from his father are corrupted by the toxic pursuit of wealth and status, especially in the male-dominated world of finance. There’s a reason that J.T. Marlin doesn’t hire anyone over 25. It’s much easier for leeches like Belfort – or Boiler Room’s Michael (Tom Everett Scott) – to convince young, mostly white men to turn con artists under the guise of male camaraderie. The trading floor becomes a playground for one-upmanship, where status is only as great as the number of people you scam, and success is dictated by the price of your suit. Furthermore, any respect that Seth’s cohort generates amongst themselves fails to cross over to actual Wall Street, where brokers view the over-the-counter traders with contempt. Younger renders the trading floor in dumpy fashion, with visibly unfinished walls and paint splotches surrounding windowless, fluorescent-lit rooms, constantly compounded by the incessant ringing of phones. At night, Seth returns home to an under-the-table poker den he runs for college students. Despite the illegality of his homegrown business, it feels infinitely more legitimate than the professional work he’s being trained to conduct.
Boiler Room’s cast is a fascinating array of early-career talent. Perhaps most notable is Vin Diesel, the same year as Pitch Black and just one year pre-Fast and Furious. As senior broker Chris Varick, Diesel is the most likable of the unscrupulous ensemble; it’s a shame to see where his legitimate charisma as a serious actor would later go to waste in an increasingly ego-driven career. Nia Long provides a strong counterpoint in an underwritten role as J.T. Marlin’s receptionist, Abbie, the sole black woman in an office of obnoxious white guys. Her romantic subplot with Seth is unconvincing, though it does offer an indication as to the naivete hiding beneath his attempts at suaveness. Younger’s script is at its best when exploring the community built between Seth and his more experienced colleagues, such as the film’s most heavily cited scene, where they gather at a senior broker’s barely furnished mansion to recite Oliver Stone’s Wall Street word-for-word. Gordon Gekko has long been synonymous with unchecked greed, but for these guys, he represents the platonic ideal of what they hope to become.
The film falters when it tries to moralize the behavior it depicts. The Wolf of Wall Street avoided this trap by remaining completely void of morality, questionably relishing in the copious drugs and sex that Belfort & Co. indulged in. Boiler Room studiously avoids this with limited success, occasionally coming across as toothless despite the blunt criticism of its execution. A late narrative thread involving a desperate family man that Seth scams grow tedious in its didacticism, which eventually builds towards an ending that’s unconvincingly tidy despite a number of loose ends. Still, despite these weaknesses, the film sports a fantastic final line. Having successfully avoided criminal charges by informing on J.T. Marlin to the FBI, Seth exits just as vans arrive to raid the building. With one final, almost confused glance at the office, he offers an indelibly blunt line of voice-over: “I gotta find a job.” It’s about as perfect a cut-to-credits as you could find.
Boiler Room is far from perfect, but it deserves greater recognition for its realistic depiction of the practices The Wolf of Wall Street would later portray in flashier, albeit intentionally misleading ways. Unpleasant aesthetic aside, the level of detail packed into Younger’s screenplay is impressive, and it sports some genuinely sharp dialogue. An anecdote from Business Insider about an advance screening of The Wolf of Wall Street near the Goldman Sachs building cites an audience of finance workers cheering at “all the wrong moments,” but it’s hard to imagine anyone inappropriately cheering at Boiler Room. The film is so flagrant in its flimsy appropriation of influences, from Glengarry Glen Ross to Goodfellas, that it turns these images against themselves, highlighting in modern-day capitalism just how easy it is to get sucked in by the wrong messages in media that actually critiques the behavior it portrays. Would you sell your soul for a Ferrari F355? Maybe not. But someone will.
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