The Wizard of Lies movie review (2017)

Almost all of “The Wizard of Lies” takes place in the aftermath of the arrest of Bernie Madoff in 2008 for orchestrating the biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history. When his sons Mark and Andrew, played here by Nivola and Nathan Darrow, who worked for Madoff, discovered that dad was writing an exorbitant number of bonus checks in December, he confessed that he was just trying to “take care of people” before the Feds came for him. And then they learned the truth—everything they thought they knew about their father and the business was a sham. They actually went to the Feds early and turned Bernie in, realizing that they would already be called accomplices, and knowing that every minute they waited would make that charge harder to deny. So, from its opening scenes, “The Wizard of Lies” is set up as the story of a family falling apart.

While the script by Sam Levinson and John Burnham Schwartz and Samuel Baum occasionally flashes back to happier times, it stays focused intently on how Bernie’s betrayal impacted Mark, Andrew and Ruth Madoff (Michelle Pfeiffer). Right away, the boys tried to distance themselves from their father, and, when Ruth stayed with Bernie, they had to avoid her calls as well. There’s a scene in which Bernie learns that his sons have refused to sign off on the bond to get him out of jail that’s one of De Niro’s best acting moments in years. You can see the pain on his face that’s somehow also blended with guilt. On an emotional level, he can’t believe his sons aren’t standing by him, but he also knows exactly why they’re not.

The structure of “The Wizard of Lies” can be a little frustrating as the film jumps back and forth in time, structured around a jailhouse interview with Madoff done years after the house of cards collapsed, and spending an incredible amount of time on the details about how exactly the scheme unraveled. There’s a better version of this film that’s half an hour shorter, and I wanted more of scenes like two key flashbacks: one to a lavish party that shows how much everyone around Bernie benefitted from his evil, and one in which Bernie basically had to play con man to keep money coming in when the market crashed. 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.