An excellent Michelle Pfeiffer

As the Barry Levinson directed movie ‘The Wizard of Lies’ will be premiered on HBO less than a month (May 20), movie reviews just started to coming out these two days with a total 100% positive feedback on both the acting and the movie itself. FilmInk said Pfeiffer is terrific and described her as ‘excellent’ as Ruth Madoff. Here are the first reviews of ‘The Wizard of Lies’, and we expect a lot more will come soon.

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Robert De Niro gives one of his best recent performances in Barry Levinson’s Bernie Maddow bio.

In what could possibly be one the best performances Robert De Niro has given in this new century, he headlines veteran filmmaker Barry Levinson’s (Rain Man, Good Morning Vietnam) dramatic reconstruction of the fall of Bernie Madoff, one of the most respected and highly regarded market traders that Wall Street has ever seen.

Bernie (De Niro) holds his family in high esteem, yet keeps them at arm’s length. His two sons Mark (Alessandro Nivola) and Andrew (House of Cards’ Nathan Darrow) beg him to reveal the inner workings of his business to them, Bernie insists they’re ‘not ready’. His wife Ruth (an excellent Michelle Pfeiffer) asks him to retire, but Bernie is adamant that the company needs his guidance. So as the film opens, the awful truth is revealed: Madoff has lost more than $65 billion dollars of his investors’ money and faces impending arrest: thousands of people’s life savings, pensions, retirement funds and company earnings, have all been vaporised. His decades long ‘Ponzi’ scheme fraud had grown to such extremes, he was incapable of reversing the damage. When clients requested several billion in returns so they can cash out, Bernie and his accountant Frank (Hank Azaria) only had $200 million in funds. When Bernie reveals the truth to his unsuspecting family, it has a cataclysmic effect. His sons’ promising careers disintegrate, Ruth becomes a social pariah. Family rifts develop as the media scrutiny becomes unbearable. The soul searching starts and so do the questions.

Madoff helped launch the Nasdaq stock market, he sat on the board of the National Association of Securities Dealers as well as advising the Securities and Exchange Commission on trading securities. For these reasons, his fraud went unnoticed.

As the stoic, virtually inert Madoff, De Niro is a picture of tightly wound conflict and constriction, his performance being more about what he doesn’t do, rather than what he does do. Pfeiffer is terrific as Ruth and Darrow and Nivola are particularly fine as his doomed sons. The scale of this family tragedy is staggering, how a man living in a bubble of obfuscation and denial, claims to love and care for them yet leaves them to shoulder the burden of media scrutiny and the harsh judgement of a public who believe them to be complicit in the fraud.

By Jarrod Walker | FILMINK

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Barry Levinson, Robert De Niro deliver grand-slam docudrama with ‘Wizard of Lies’

When critics talk about this being a golden age of TV drama, they are referring to series like “Game of Thrones” or “House of Cards.”

But after seeing Oprah Winfrey in HBO’s “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” last week and now previewing Robert De Niro in HBO’s “The Wizard of Lies,” it is starting to feel as if this might be a golden age of made-for-TV movies as well.

From daring direction by Barry Levinson, to De Niro’s mesmerizing performance as disgraced financier Bernie Madoff, “The Wizard of Lies,” which premieres at the Maryland Film Festival Thursday in advance of its May 20 HBO debut, is another grand-slam docudrama from TV’s premier cable channel.

I have long admired De Niro and Levinson, but in recent years, I have to admit to taking a critical pass on some of their work. With Levinson, it mostly involved TV series he produced, like “The Bedford Diaries” (2006). With De Niro, there were movies like “Dirty Grandpa” (2016).

At 75 and 73, respectively, Levinson and De Niro certainly earned some critical kindness given their long careers of Academy-Award-winning work. But I need give them no quarter for age or past glories on “The Wizard of Lies.” It stands on its own excellence as a compelling exploration of one of the most enigmatic sociopaths of our time.

For those not so familiar with Madoff, who is now serving a prison sentence of 150 years, his investment firm was thought to be worth $50 billion. But what the former chairman of NASDAQ had really built was one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history.

“It’s all one big, fat [expletive] lie,’ De Niro’s Madoff says in the film as his swindle is about to come undone in the face of nervous investors scrambling to get their money out during the Wall Street meltdown of 2008. “There are no investments. I made them all up. They’re all fake.”

The degree to which he bilked investors who trusted him is perhaps best suggested by the case of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and his wife, Marion, who lost their life savings as well as $15.2 million from a foundationthey had founded. Many elderly clients were totally wiped out financially by Madoff’s epic scam.

One investor is shown slitting his wrists with a box cutter over a wastebasket so as not to make too big a mess with his suicide.

De Niro doesn’t play Madoff as a non-stop raging monster the way, say, Al Pacino played attorney Roy Cohn in HBO’s “Angels in America.” With De Niro, the performance is much more internal and cerebral. A twitch of his eye, a cocking of his head or a pursing of his lips into a sour expression can be as powerful and even menacing as another actor issuing a threat at the top of his lungs.

But for that to work, the director has to put the camera right in the star’s face and never back off. The dance between the Levinson’s camera and De Niro’s face is everything.

De Niro’s visage is movie-star iconic, and Levinson knows just what to do with it — just the way he did with Robert Redford’s face in “The Natural” or Warren Beatty’s in “Bugsy.”

The camera settles in on a close-up, and that is the center of the film universe. As old-school Hollywood as it might be in terms of style, it is perfect for the subject matter of this film.

Madoff was not just the center of his family and the fraudulent $50 billion investment business, he was the Alpha and Omega. He held all the power and secrets and shared none of then with his wife and sons. Everything and everyone fed off his autocratic power and was affected by his moods. When De Niro’s Madoff becomes angry, you can almost feel the fear of family and employes through the screen.

The best stretch of the film comes during the near-crash of the economy during the fall of 2008 — just as Barack Obama was about to become president.

Madoff is scrambling to bring in new investors so that he has cash to pay back some of the longtime clients who are screaming to get out.

As a drummer lays down a jazzy, throbbing, jungle-drum beat, suggesting the mounting pressure Madoff is feeling and the cascade of bad news flowing through the larger economy, Levinson’s camera zeroes in on Madoff and a potential investor at a party in Palm Beach.

The action is all in De Niro’s face as his Madoff takes the client from an investment of $100 million to $400 million with very few words. A squint, a slight shake of the head, a tight little smile, and the deal is made.

But it’s not nearly enough money to keep the house of cards from collapsing.

As the economy edges closer to the cliff and the demands to get out of his fund grow louder, Madoff sits down for a family dinner with his wife, Ruth, and the families of his two sons, Andrew and Mark.

“How is Wall Street, Poppa?” Madoff’s 8-year-old granddaughter Emily asks.

“Wall Street is good,” he says distractedly, cutting into his food.

“Dad says things are bad on Wall Street,” the little girl replies.

“Well, your dad might have said that, but they are fine.”

“Then why do they call it ‘meltdown?'” Emily says in a small voice.

“Do you read Barron’s? Do you read The Wall Street Journal?” he demands of the girl.

“I gotta get grilled by this kid,” Madoff angrily continues as family members look on apprehensively. “I got so many other [expletive] things to worry about on Wall Street, and this kid’s saying how bad it is.”

By the time he tells Emily in a loud voice to “shut up and eat your food,” she’s in tears in her grandmother’s arms, and everyone else at the table appears to be in a state of shock.

Levinson, who has a special touch with scenes involving food (think “Diner”), paces the scene so that the viewer feels the full power of the explosion — further amplified because it is directed toward the little girl.

A grandchild’s voice is again heard calling out to Madoff during a nightmare sequence in a suicide attempt via Ambien by the financier and his wife.