![]() Over the course of two hours and nearly 15 minutes “The Wizard of Lies,” debuting Saturday at 8 p.m., depicts Madoff as a bit of both. The man’s actual height doesn’t matter it was the combination of his heavy-lidded eyes and slumped shoulders that made him appear, for all the world, defeated - not at all the monster that he actually is. When the word of Madoff’s gargantuan Ponzi scheme shouted its way into the headlines in 2008, one memory that starkly stands out is how small the cameras made the man look. Ruth still thinks she’s under the protection of an untouchable financier. But in the film jazz music excitedly dances behind the action and the room is softly lit and golden. In that moment, Madoff sealed not only his fate but cursed his family’s future. ![]() The man who lies to the world is the world’s slave from then on, a controversial conservative hero once observed. “Would that be OK?” Ruth asks, and in less than the space of an exhale Madoff replies, “Sure.” Then his wife Ruth (Michelle Pfeiffer) comes up to him and mentions by the by that her sister was worried about the economy and was thinking about investing the rest of her savings with him. And you know what they say about appearances. Others chase him around, given that his fund appears to be a safe harbor at a time when all other ships are going down. Even as his right-hand man Frank DiPascali (Hank Azaria) is warning him on the phone of the massive panicked withdrawals his investors are calling in, Madoff is working the whales in the room, persuading them to commit hundreds of millions of dollars to his dishonest scheme. A scene in HBO’s “The Wizard of Lies” shows the notorious Wall Street swindler, played by Robert DeNiro, at a Palm Beach black-tie event in October 2008. “Let me ask you a question,” Madoff says to Henriques, who scored the first jailhouse sit-down with Madoff and plays herself onscreen.Even in the midst of the direst economic meltdown in modern times, Bernie Madoff was the life of the party. But why revisit the Madoff affair now, with so many other headline-making horrors having gone down in the meantime? Because the film serves as a powerful-and timely-reminder of just how much damage can be inflicted by a single empathy-averse narcissist. It’s a riveting story, and De Niro, in particular, turns in a performance seamless enough to avenge his recent run of schlocky comedies. In the film, he shows far more emotion over a smudged place setting at his office beach party than he does about dismantling the lives of his supposed loved ones. (Madoff, who has claimed to be happier in prison than he was on the outside, in some measure blames his victims for trusting him.) Henriques, the movie-which stars Robert De Niro as Madoff and Michelle Pfeiffer (both below) as his wife, Ruth-shows the fraudster as both completely delusional and shockingly remorseless. Based on the book by the New York Times writer Diana B. The Wizard of Lies, a film directed by Barry Levinson and premiering on HBO this Saturday, May 20 at 8 p.m., takes us inside the broken clan’s dramatic unraveling. Today, almost nine years after the fraud came to light, both of Madoff’s sons are dead (one by suicide), his brother remains in prison, and his wife has downsized from their Manhattan penthouse to a one-bedroom rental in Connecticut, where she’s essentially hiding out from her many haters. Countless people were devastated by Bernard Madoff’s infamous multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, including members of his own family.
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