The preposterous fantasies of contemporary capitalism and the infamous aftermath of the so-called 2008 and beyond financial crises have spawned a series of self-righteous financially half-literate second rate films, JC Chandor's Margin Call (2011) excepted. The Wizard of Lies excepted too.
The Wizard of Lies is the 24th feature film directed by Barry Levinson, prolific, eclectic and uneven director with a penchant for US garden variety humanism (to digress four two or three lines, one of my earliest film criticism memories is reading an excessively encomiastic review of Levison's debut feature Diner, the first of his famous Baltimore tetralogy, back in 1982 in Time magazine by either Richard Corliss or Richard Schickel), here at his very best.
The Wizard of Lies tells the true story of Bernie Madoff, second only to that of Frank Abagnale (portrayed in Steven Spielberg's 2002 Catch Me if You Can) in the art of playing up conventional social perceptions and expectations to pull out unbelievable outcomes. Madoff's story is very well known, but unlike, say, Jordan Belfort (portrayed by Leonardo di Caprio in Martin Scorsese's “The Wolf of Wall Street”, 2013, btw come to think of it this film is excepted from the aforementioned second rate too), who peddled penny stocks, fraudulent telemarketing and the like, Madoff managed to build a massive Ponzi scheme right at the heart of the US´s supposedly highly regulated and effectively supervised financial system.
More subtly than usually for Barry Levinson, The Wizard of Lies mostly ignores the plotty shenanigans of Madoff's dissimulations and refrains from lambasting capitalist corruption, concentrating instead on the figure of Bernie (Robert de Niro's best performance since Casino, Martin Scorsese, 1995 ) and the personal tragedy his deeds brought to himself, his wife Ruth (Michelle Pfeiffer's best performance ever) and his sons Mark (Alessandro Nivola, keeping up) and Andrew (Nathan Darrow, ditto), whose lives (spoiler alert for those who don’t know the true story) Madoffs actions ultimately cost. De Niro portrays Madoff in a matter-of-fact victim of circumstance/banality of evil fashion that eschews both sympathy and condemnation, reflected through Levinson's direction in the reactions of all knowingly or otherwise involved in his protagonist's undoing.
In a recent demonstration in front of the White House against some Trump lunacy, one of the demonstrators held a large cardboard wherein the following seminal sentence was written: “THIS IS NOT NORMAL!” The Wizard of Lies, mostly through De Niro's Learean performance, persistently asks the question without ever giving the solace of answer.