THE WIZARD OF LIES (2017)
White-collar liars who steal money from the poor and
give nothing back to the community are typical cinematic and literary antiheroes
– there is nothing existential about them, they are just greedy yet they possess
a snake oil charm. Modern cinema has had them in great ubiquity, among the most
reptilian without question was Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street.”
The mistaken assumption is that Gordon was seen as a hero of the cocaine-laden,
money-hungry 1980’s. He was no hero and goes to jail for his offenses, you
know, buying stock and selling it cheap and making millions in the process.
Still, Gordon had something money can’t buy – sophistication and a smile that
most grifters could never muster. Bernie Madoff, a real-life swindler, used a
Ponzi scheme to rip off wealthy people through the wealth management branch of
his firm. It amounted to more than 65 billion dollars fraud, the biggest of its
kind in history. In Barry Levinson’s deadly serious film, “The Wizard of Lies,”
Bernie is an amoral man who steals, and steals, and steals and there is nothing
more, nothing less at stake. From
beginning to end, he is the same exact person, resolutely uncaring and
undeniably evil.
In 1960, Bernie Madoff (Robert De Niro) founded and
was chairman of the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities
LLC. Although I can’t begin to understand this firm’s business model, let’s
just say that it was linked to the creation of NASDAQ. The roots of the firm’s
prominence and longevity, however, hold little interest in “The Wizard of Lies.”
The film starts off in December 2008, just after the economic collapse, when
the turds began to fly and hit innocent victims in the face. Well, not so
innocent to Madoff who justifies his criminal activity of more than two decades
by claiming that his victims should’ve known better than to invest. His victims
were greedy, if not more so than he was.
The fascinating aspect to “The Wizard of Lies” is
that there is no sense of sneaky, amoral fun to the schemes, no real kick. A
business meeting is what it is, and when Madoff scores and gets the billions,
he has no real pleasure in what he does. Ironically, it is as if it meant
nothing to him, just another day at the office.
Madoff’s marriage to Ruth (a spectacularly awesome
Michelle Pfeiffer) lacks passion, to say the least, and the most disturbing
scene between them (which could have been unintentionally funny under the wrong
hands) is when Ruth decides that a suicide pact by ingesting lots of Ambien
would be preferred than dealing with the consequences of losing her husband in
jail. Ugh, that was too alarming for me, too realistically conveyed
particularly when Madoff decides to join her. Once again, there is no fun to be
had in this marriage before or after the convictions against Madoff.
Madoff’s relationship to his two sons who work at
the firm results in tense arguments and friction. Things get heated between
Ruth and Bernie – how did these two ever fall in love in the first place or was
it merely a business transaction? That reminded me of De Niro’s business-minded
Ace Rothstein in Scorsese’s “Casino” who got his Vegas girlfriend (Sharon
Stone) to commit to a marriage by approaching it like a business transaction.
The difference was that Ace seemed to really care about his wife in that film –
Madoff can’t or won’t show emotion. Essentially, “The Wizard of Lies” is about
an obsessively business-minded suit with no emotional interior or exterior. Everyone
else in the family shows some measure of regret, particularly at not knowing
what gross misdeeds the family patriarch was up to.
Robert De Niro, still one of our finest actors ever
(watch “The Intern” for proof that he never lost his bite post-“Analyze This”),
has a difficult task at hand – he has to play a blank-faced man with zero
emotion. When his sons get too inquisitive, he brushes them off with angry,
curse-laden words. Yet De Niro, a passionate actor of a high level of
intensity, never expresses any other singular emotion except the look of a
sourpuss who has avoided a human connection beyond the discussion of borrowing
money. His Madoff (and no doubt the real person as well) is an aggressive Ponzi
schemer who can take and take without ever feeling the repercussions. Sure, he
ends up in jail with several life sentences but it does not affect him. Yes,
there is the aforementioned Ambien fever dream sequence where Bernie and Ruth
take several pills with the intent of committing suicide and all he can ask is,
“are you sure?” Ruth eventually leaves him, his sons die (one a tragic suicide,
the other from mantle cell lymphoma) and he is still standing around like a
passive statue in prison without remorse. If there is any sense of compassion,
he sure has a funny way of showing it. De Niro, the fiery Method actor who gave
us solid emotional firecracker portraits in the past like Jake La Motta and
Travis Bickle, has given us his first apathetic sociopath. He gets several rude
awakenings but all they do is enclose him further from us. We come up empty and
realize that De Niro and director Levinson have made us angry at this
monstrosity. Our feelings matter, his do not.
