The Wizard of Lies

... is the lesson I took away from the Bernie Madoff story, even before I saw this film. Think about this - Bernie Madoff is serving 150 years, and his earliest release date is 2039. Charles Manson has been getting regular parole hearings since the 1990s. Who is more dangerous? A better question is who is more dangerous to the plutocracy.

The whole story is basically done in flashback after Madoff is incarcerated and is being interviewed by a reporter. This film takes the approach of assuming that the wife and sons knew nothing until Bernie told them right before he was arrested. If there is anything the Bernie Madoff story would teach you, it is "Don't steal from the very rich". The movie emphasized all of the little people who lost everything to the Ponzi scheme, but there were enough people with enough money left over - as in hundreds of millions - that they could hire attorneys and even claw back money from people who withdrew all of their money before Bernie went bust, even though they knew nothing of the scheme. Compare that to what happened to the banksters who swindled the entire nation - which was absolutely nothing, or Enron, where the Bush administration had to practically be shamed into prosecuting the executives who swindled investors. To date about 70% of the money Bernie Madoff swindled has been recovered, with "small" investors - those that invested less than a million - being made completely whole.

Anyways, back to "The Wizard", which doesn't mention any of this. DeNiro was terrific as a guy who decided to keep his swindling secret to himself - and one smarmy associate played by Hank Azaria. Michelle Pfeiffer as Ruth Madoff almost stole the show from DeNiro as a woman who can't deal with being ostracized and hated for something she had nothing to do with. She wonders aloud how she got to be almost 70 and never learned to do anything for herself. De Niro's Madoff is shown as being able to compartmentalize how he is stealing from investors, many of whom are family and friends, encouraging those at the end to put in huge amounts of money to keep the scheme afloat in the wake of the 2008 crash, which is ultimately what did him in, and somehow sees taking what is left of his ill gotten gains and distributing it to his family and "a few loyal employees" before he turns himself in as "noblesse oblige" not just more theft, which it was.

Hints to Madoff's personality are in the little scenes. He is very stoic about being the world's biggest and most brazen thief caught to date, but he does get animated about a dirty dish and the way lobster is served at a society dinner he is hosting.

There is one particularly odd scene for Turner Classic Movie fans. At one point, while Bernie is under house arrest, Bernie and his wife decide to commit suicide in "a nice way" using Ambien and a bunch of other pharmaceuticals they have around the house. It doesn't work - they wake up the next morning. But as they lay in bed expecting to die, who pops up on the TV screen they are watching but the recently deceased Robert Osborne and TCM with him introducing Judy Garland singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". What an odd touch. I didn't even think anybody at HBO even knew that TCM existed.

After reading a couple of negative reviews about this movie, I get the impression that the people who found it insufficient or boring completely lost the point. Levinson didn't try to pull a "Fincher" with this one. In other words, "Wizard of Lies" is not a documentary, touching on each and every aspect of this infamous case in every detail. This is more of a psychogram (i.e. character portrayal) of the members of the Madoff family. With that in mind, the movie touches wonderfully on the dynamics of an ultimately patriarchal family; the "castration" of the sons, the absolute dependence of every member of the family on the father, and on what happens when this father goes down in a big, BIG way. If you are interested in learning about the greatest financial fraud in the history of the USA (some say of all time), then visit the Wikipedia page or watch a documentary. This movie will not cover your needs. If you want to watch a beautifully directed, acted and edited psychological drama, then "The Wizard of Lies" is right up your alley.

An interesting attempt to weave a story line on the Madoff ponzi scheme but one that in the end is disjoint, incomplete, and largely unsatisfying. It certainly falls far short of other great financial movies – the Big Short, Margin Call, and Smartest Guys in the Room, to name a few. Worth watching but not likely a movie to savor, add closure, provide moral assurance, or make you feel anything. Too many moving pieces that lack grounding – the timeline has no center and the flashbacks and jumps forward are too disjoint, too many supporting characters are painted as morally ambiguous, and the many defrauded clients are nameless and faceless.

As for the some of the details, it's hard to get around Michelle Pfeiffer accent. It may be spot-on but the voice is just annoying. Add in Robert De Niro's unbalanced intonations and a discordant soundtrack and sound-editing and it is not a movie that will sit well with your ears.

It should have been done as a 3-4 part mini-series. They would have had a lot more time to not only relay the full time line and details of the case but also go into the many interesting sub-stories and tragedies. For example, the efforts of Harry Markopolos to unmask the fraud is addressed only by showing Bernie and Ruth watching 30 seconds of testimony on the TV in their condo. The questions of the hundreds of millions potentially transferred to London accounts for the benefit of Madoff relatives is not explored. The ineptitude of the SEC, FINRA and other agencies is also given short-shrift. Did you know that Shana Madoff, the chief compliance officer and niece of Bernie Madoff, married an Assistant Director of the Office of Compliance Investigations and Examinations at the SEC. They met in 2003 when he was performing an examination as to whether Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme. The SEC Director of Compliance Investigations and Examinations attended their wedding in 2007.

As it is, the movie dips its toe into the $64.8B (yes $64.8 billion) fraud case and provides some insights as to who in the inner circle may or may not have been culpable– all in the course largely telling a family drama. Interesting and entertaining, yes. A good film, meh. Disappointing for what it could have been, most definitely.

I wanted more, more of how Bernie Madoff became the man we meet in this film. When we meet him he is already rotten. He is mere months away from his arrest.

There is in Robert DeNiro's portrayal little or nothing to like or empathize with. Or care about. What we have is a true sociopath who is found out early in the film, which forces us to see nothing but the devastation left in his wake.

This is my way of saying there is no story arc. There are no surprises. What flashbacks there are show Madoff in his personal life but always at his worst.

Michelle Pheiffer as Madoff's wife has a small rand unconvincing role. And like her husband, I couldn't care less about her fate. As for the Madoff sons, to some degree this is more their story than anyone else's. And to the degree that I learned quite a bit about them, the film deserves credit.

But that is not enough to warrant its viewing.

The Wizard of Lies chronicles the infamous Wall Street meltdown that was Madoff's Billion Dollar Ponzi scheme in Barry Levinson's woefully flawed but still engaging film. Starring Robert De Niro and Michelle Pffeifer, The Wizard of Lies features a strong cast of seasoned actors that give their best on screen. De Niro particularly is very strong here and gives his best performance in close to a decade. However, the film suffers from a broken and jumbled script that leaves for a somewhat confusing watch.

The film begins with an interview between Madoff and the subsequent author of his unofficial biography. He begins telling the story at the end of the meltdown on the eve of his arrest and starts from there. From here on out, we're told the story in chunks and pieces, from one perspective to another and totally abandons all formality regarding coherent storytelling. Instead, Levinson creates a deeply personal character study that paints Madoff as a sociopath and a white collar criminal mastermind who would rather blame the victim than himself. While it is engrossing to see De Niro as Madoff, it is barely enough to sustain its bloated runtime.

The film is engrossing to watch. There's no denying it but as the minutes ticked by, it all started to feel redundant. It was more so just dragging the entire Madoff family through hell for the remaining hour of the film and it becomes exhausting after awhile. In a way it was very much a Greek tragedy of epic proportions that just didn't seem to end and by the time it decided it wanted to, you were already checked out 10 minutes prior. Despite this, the ending is satisfying for those wanting to see karma at its best or a tragedy at its worst, whatever way you want to look at it.

Overall, The Wizard of Lies is a missed opportunity more so than not. While it is great to see De Niro and Pfeiffer in top forms, it would have been nice to get a more coherent script from a story that literally writes itself. While anyone expecting a film in the vein of The Big Short will be let down by this, The Wizard of Lies benefits from being a deep character study that shines a (small) light of one of the most tragic mysteries of the 2008 financial crisis.