Bernie Madoff isnt in the best scene of HBOs Bernie Madoff movie.
No slight to Robert De Niro, who gives a fine performance as the Ponzi Schemer.
The actor captures the fraudsters frustrating banality-of-evil blankness.
Credit: Craig Blankenhorn/HBO
So the best and most provocative sequence in the movie is just that: People askingwhy, andhow.
Hes being questioned by government investigators, who cant believe that Mark was in the dark.
The manworkedfor his father.
Didnt he ever ask any questions?
Youre the FBI, Mark responds, angry and desperate, but most of all confused.
You investigated him before.
How the f didyounot know?
He lists all his fathers honorifics.
The list slips into financial esperanto; I marked in my notes the phrase FINRA before FINRA existed.
(Maybe that was the problem.)
Why didnt the government know?
Why didnt his family know?The Wizard of Lieswants to cycle between the personal and the political.
And there are flurries of news footage, and financial exposition.
The films wants to do so many things.
Most of them feel like distractions.
Dont understand the finances?
Heres some family drama!
Bored of the family?
Too bummed out by the victims?
Look, heres a flashback to the Madoffs living large in the Hamptons!
The constituent parts mask the lack of an actual whole.
The film itself is a Ponzi Scheme.
And what is a Ponzi Scheme?
I think we all know?
Lets not test each other.
The 2008 financial crisis is the single most important event in recent history that barely anyone understands.
The numbers are difficult, the language obtuse, the intentions inscrutable.
The problem was computers, or capitalism, or them, or us.
Any attempt to dramatize the event requires some amount of narrative hand-holding.
It had the facts but lacked a pulse.
(With Josh Brolin as Bretton James, fiscal supervillain and motorcycle enthusiast!)
Adam McKaysThe Big Shortfound the dark humor inside the apocalypse.
Im not sure logic is the answer here, cinematically speaking.
Richard Gere played a shady hedge fund manager, beset on all sides by ruin of his own creation.
The Wizard of Liesapproaches the crisis laterally.
Madoffs scheme unravels when the system does.
And the films Bernie situates himself in the greater context of 2008.
This country needs a villain, he says.
(The implication isnt that they picked the wrong guy, but rather, they shouldve pickedmoreguys.)
He reveals his great lie to his family, and things spiral from there.
We see the scandal, and we see what led up to it.
Bernie hosts a party at the Hamptons, dancing with his family and singing along to Sweet Caroline.
We see Bernie at a rich-person party, desperately hunting for new investments.
Moments like this are charged.
Director Barry Levinson has an occasional eye for the surreal details in the realities of the case.
In a standout sequence, Ruth announces to Bernie that she has decided to kill herself.
How, her husband asks, will she do it?
Something nice, Ruth says, nonchalantly.
(Thisapparentlyactually happened, though good luck trusting anything these days.)
Somehow,The Wizard of Liesis least creative when its most creative.
Levinsons working with facts, but hes also working with family.
Son Sam Levinson is a credited co-writer (along withReservation Roadauthor John Burnham Schwartz).
Maybe thats why the story focuses so much on Bernies family.
Its an intriguing idea his family members were victims too, the film argues.
Maybe you think that misses the point, but the main problem is there just isnt much film there.
Thats true for Ruth, too.
She spends the movie in a daze, barely cognizant of how her whole world ended.
But Pfeiffer is stunning.
Shes been demolished by the man she loved, and the lives he ruined.
She doesnt understandhow, cant really graspwhy.
