MONEY MONSTER
Madoff scandal gets HBO treatment in ‘Wizard of Lies’
B ERNIE Madoff is an inscrutable, diabolical figure whose Ponzi scheme, exposed in 2008 as the biggest fraud in US history, has yielded not one, but two, high-profile television projects: The 2016 ABC miniseries “Madoff,” which starred Richard Dreyfuss, and now “The Wizard of
Lies,” an HBO movie with Robert De Niro as the evil mastermind. While the former gave a clearer picture of how Madoff ’s secret operation worked, the new movie achieves its greatest power as a character study.
Based on the book by New York Times reporter Diana B. Henriques, who gets to play herself interviewing Madoff in prison, the film begins with Madoff gathering his sons, Mark (Nathan Darrow) and Andy (Alessandro Nivola), and wife Ruth (Michelle Pfeiffer), to tell them the money — $50 billion — is gone.
“There are no investments,” he says with chilling simplicity. “I made them up. I took some money from some people and gave it other people. There’s nothing left.”
Naturally, the Madoffs are baffled and clueless as to the explosion of publicity and investor rage about to rain down upon them. In one of the film’s most trenchant scenes, Ruth is shocked when she goes to her upscale salon to get her roots done and discovers she is unwelcome among her own kind.
While De Niro mostly plays Madoff as a callous, grumpy old man who gives some insight into his lunacy (he calls his investors “accomplices” unwilling “to take responsibility for their behavior”), Pfeiffer, using a nasal outerborough accent, really delivers, showing how Ruth’s reluctant awareness of her husband’s depravity presents its own moral quandary. During a prison visit, she tells him, “Even if you had told me, I’m not sure I would have turned you in. I don’t know what that says about me. That’s the tragedy of it.”
Her deadpan reaction when a newscaster compares her to Bonnie Parker may win Pfeiffer an Emmy. “How am I Bonnie?” she asks, cigarette dangling. “Bonnie was a killer. I ain’t Bonnie.”
Madoff ’s relationship with his sons receives thoughtful exploration as well, particularly with the doomed Mark, who hung himself in 2010. Director Barry Levinson strikingly shows how controlling the Madoff patriarch could be when he literally switches Mark’s steak dinner for lobster at a family party, even though it upsets his stomach. Levinson also powerfully portrays the extent of the losses felt by investors with a black-and-white montage of them grasping what’s happened, including one suicide by straight razor. Running over two hours, “The Wizard of Lies” could have used some tightening, particularly in the beginning, but it has a chilling finish, with Madoff, serving his 150-year sentence, asking Henriques, “Do you think I’m a sociopath?”