The Wizard of Lies

What “Wizard of Lies” lacks in terms of a broader historical span is compensated for by telling Madoff’s tale as a classical tragedy about hubris and human cost--only in this case we watch as the villain’s wife and children take the brunt of the toll. DeNiro and Pfeiffer are as formidable in their roles as one would expect them to be, and the easy conversational flair with which Henriques squares off with DeNiro is incredible.

You don’t have to be rich to feel the agony of Madoff’s victims, and Wizard shrewdly transcends the the-rich-are-people-too genre by making Madoff’s family drama seem universal.

All these characters, including Bernie, come into focus only after The Wizard of Lies sets up the Madoff case, giving us an obligatory survey on the crime and how it played out. That material, which fills the first third of the film, is unnecessary. Once we turn to the psychological fallout, and Levinson gives us a more intimate point of view, The Wizard of Lies is captivating.

The Wizard of Lies doesn’t try to either understand or humanize Madoff, but all the same it manages to be an intimate, unsettling portrait of a borderline sociopath.

This stark account of a family's downfall has the wrenching power of an Arthur Miller Classic. [15-28 May 2017, p.17]

The new movie achieves its greatest power as a character study.

Barry Levinson's The Wizard of Lies is a fascinating, and in many ways horrifying glimpse into one of the most notorious thieves in American history.

Mostly, The Wizard of Lies is a film of fantastic acting beats--the way Pfeiffer captures a mother choosing husband over sons; the way Nivola’s paranoia builds as he realizes the public hates him too; the matter-of-fact decisions of a suicide attempt by the Madoffs when they saw no other way out.

Almost everything in The Wizard of Lies succeeds. The acting is impeccable, the script taut and Levinson’s direction scalpel-sharp. ... But what’s missing in Wizard is the why.

It's a mess. Michelle Pfeiffer, howeever, is stunning, and has a Queens accent so thick it's funny. [19 May 2017, p.55] The Wizard of Lies is less convincingly about Bernie Madoff than it is about the struggle to understand Bernie Madoff: The search for why and how, by his family and his victims and the system, maybe even the man himself.

Acting in his first television project, the Oscar winner portrays Madoff as an emotion-free money machine, taking advantage where he can, easily convincing himself that the people he’s bilking are aware of the game he’s playing, making them willing participants in their own downfall.

Director Barry Levinson is behind the camera here and as an actor-focused filmmaker, he often seems more interested in creating standout moments for his cast than in fitting those scenes into a compelling narrative. This is a character-driven film, which--like a Ponzi scheme--suffers from some diminishing returns the longer it runs. But at its peak, the movie pays off.

The Wizard of Lies doesn’t have the pop of “The Wolf of Wall Street” or “The Big Short” but it does its best to give viewers a look at a man who still seems like an enigma. Complexity aside, it gives De Niro one more notch on his belt of highly detailed, award-winning characters.

Not surprisingly, given the tawny auspices of an HBO production that screams "awards bait" from every pore, the trappings of Wizard of Lies are, like Madoff's possessions, designed to impress. The movie, however, doesn't fare quite as well in getting to the root of his magic act, or how he was able for so long to keep his house of cards standing.

Madoff proves too slippery for clear characterization, even for the combined talents of Levinson and De Niro, and the result is a film that is dull, with bursts of weird.

While the movie spends comparatively little time on the thousands of people Madoff defrauded (acknowledging them in a couple of brief but intense montages), it conveys the severity of his crimes in the devastation of his immediate family, showing how he did lasting damage to the people he loved most, and none of them ever understood why.

Featuring an enigmatic lead performance by Robert De Niro. ... Wizard of Lies is a much odder thing, a character study without a conclusive answer to be revealed on its subject.

This is all well and good, and might have made a good episode of Showtime's barbarous Wall Street drama Billions. But, having expressed every cogent thought in its head in the first 50 minutes, Wizard drags along for another tortuously repetitive hour and half, a long day's journey into utter banality.

In the end, you are of course left with no sympathy for Bernie Madoff--that’s to be expected. But you also have no greater insight into who he is and why he did it.

The film is a bit too long. Wizard of Lies has some worthwhile moments, but it never seems sure at what it’s trying to be.

The Wizard of Lies is determined to play things straight and footnoted, which would be fine if viewers had tuned in for a documentary. When what we’re really here for is De Niro, Pfeiffer and some drama. Things don’t really get good until a flashback to a company dinner Madoff threw for his employees the summer before everything came tumbling down.

The film jumps erratically across the years to show how Madoff’s arrest in 2008 for a $65 billion Ponzi scheme ruined his family, depicted here as much victims as those who trusted Madoff and lost their fortunes. Yet it’s as if you are watching the work of a first-time director who read about his craft off a flash card.

Like a number of recent TV movies emanating from HBO, this film is dutiful without being essential.

Despite the sad fates of members of the Madoff family, The Wizard of Lies fails to summon much pathos or deliver much insight into Wall Street's get-rich-at-any-cost ethos.