The series will follow the prodigious rise and abrupt demise of the former investment advisor, Bernie Madoff, who's Ponzi scheme bilked $65 billion from unsuspecting victims, and the subsequent fallout with his family, associates and investors.
Madoff feels like a network-TV attempt at something much darker and deeper, but outside of its charismatic leading man, there isn't much to recommend it.
Neither particularly bad nor stellar, Madoff is a mildly entertaining, though far from impressive, miniseries with oversimplified depictions of white-collar thieves, bumbling to the point of cartoonish financial analysts, and fraud run rampant.
The film is otherwise unremarkable, really, but because Dreyfuss is given an exceptional tool with which to pound the sincerity of his remorselessness, it elevates what could be facile villainy to something more indelible.
The miniseries that is constructed around [Dreyfuss], though, is flat and simplistic, with none of the intelligence and intrigue that has elevated other stories set in high finance, Billions and The Big Short.
Madoff succeeds where it counts, at least: it gets great stuff out of Dreyfuss, and from Danner, who gives Ruth a boozy tragicomedy that nicely offsets Madoff's wheezy villainy.
I'm not sure how much is invented in the script, but one thing is clear: Dreyfuss turns out to be the real magician in making a film with so much financial detail so often entertaining.
