A monetary ‘magician’ of dirty tricks in ABC drama ‘Madoff’

The show is a surprisingly dry look at how Madoff’s ruin, spurred by the collapse of the US housing market and subsequent financial crisis, destroyed his family and landed him with a 150-year jail sentence. That’s because Dreyfuss played former President George W. Bush’s right-hand man in the 2008 Oliver Stone film, W. “And if I made up a fake account number, they’d find out the moment they called”, says Madoff in voice over as he gives them a fake number.

Speaking to ABC News, his lawyer at the time, Ira Sorkin, said that while he had a “little bit of a heart problem” he is doing fine.

Whatever his MO for channeling his inner darkness, it works for him here. Oscar victor Richard Dreyfuss plays Madoff, who pleaded guilty in 2009 in the Wall Street scandal that cost thousands of clients as much as $40 billion in more than 100 countries.

Beside him for this monumental rise and fall was his devoted wife Ruth, who in “Madoff” receives a raw but compassionate portrayal by Blythe Danner.

Money is a hot-button issue for anybody who has it or wants it. The catch, though, is that few actually understand high finance to the degree necessary to be engrossed by a movie about it. In one of the better scenes in “Madoff”, numbers cruncher Harry Markopolos (Frank Whaley), who has discovered that Madoff’s investments can’t possibly be returning as much as claimed, attempts to tell the SEC how he knows, only to be dismissed.

“I didn’t ask her a lot of probing questions, but it was good to get a feeling of who she was: a composed, lovely lady”, Danner says. She has told others she still hears from her imprisoned husband “now and then” and never went through with her threatened plans to seek a divorce.

Mancini, who was convicted for the illegal sales of pain medication in 2006 said many came to him for financial advice and that he was given a “plum job” in the prison commissary, selling snacks to other inmates. Dreyfuss is a spirited actor who doesn’t get enough opportunities these days to cut loose, and he plays Madoff with the exact mix of charm, chutzpah, and extreme denial you would hope for from the notorious fraudster.

“I turned it down”.

“I’m not a awful person”, he told a reporter for NY magazine, Steve Fishman, in a telephone call.

Madoff’s crime was the largest financial crime in US history. Indeed, the ripple effects of his racket even reached the “Madoff” production previous year, according to the film’s director, Raymond De Felitta.

He said there were just too many indications that something unusual was going on in the Madoff business for her to miss.

It doesn’t help that the miniseries feels like an ABC show through and through, from the jangly placeholder score that sounds copy-pasted out of an episode of Dirty Sexy Money to the uninspired visuals (smash-cuts to stock images of a prison every time Bernie thinks the Feds are onto him).

Madoff comes off as a human being without a conscience, who stole from charities and his own secretary.