TRUMP’S EFFECT...
told riches that can be had — if you break the rules. You know: like the billionaires do.
Over at HBO, Season 4 of Silicon Valley shows the high-tech gang once again trying to get elusive funding for various apps they hope will put them in the billionaire’s club — and as usual, greed puts the kibosh on the best-laid plans, as Danesh (Kumail Nanjiani)’s “See Food” app is ripped off by rivals, and Richard (Thomas Middleditch) sinks to the level of partnering with enemy Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) to shore up funding. Gavin’s ruthless greed even takes a (literally) vampiric turn in an episode where he hires a young dude to give him fresh blood infusions while he takes meetings. Creepy.
Greed also lies at the center of HBO’s The Wizard of Lies, with Bernie Madoff (an impeccable Robert De Niro) and his besieged wife Ruth (Michelle Pfeiffer, every bit De Niro’s onscreen match) hit by the reality of prison time for bilking clients out of untold billions in a Ponzi investment scheme. They calmly discuss suicide. “What were you thinking of using?” Bernie asks Ruth. “Maybe Ambien. Something nice,” she answers with a shrug.
Barry Levinson’s edgy direction shifts gears between humanizing the most despised stock swindler in US financial history, and bringing his investor victims into sharp focus. Driving the Big Dupe was an even bigger greed: even small investors went against good judgment in entrusting their life savings to Madoff, who constructed a scheme to bilk more and more suckers to replenish funds pulled out as the stock market went sour in 2008. (The real tsunami — the collapse of the housing market — would come a year later. Does anybody still miss those Bush years?)
Levinson’s HBO drama shows the repercussions of unmitigated greed — a devoted wife who ends up rejecting Madoff’s calls as he serves a sentence of 150 years for his destructive schemes; a son who commits suicide in the shameful aftermath; another who gets cancer and dies. And that’s just Madoff’s family. The Wizard of Lies indeed shows us how a character can be destroyed, inside and out, for the love of money. It’s a theme remarkably in step with modern America, with a billionaire-in-chief promising prosperity around the corner, even as he takes regular golf weekends at his exclusive Florida resort.
“All for what?” as Detective Marge Gundersson memorably asked in the original Coen Brothers’ Fargo. “Just a little bit of money.”