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“Do you think I'm a sociopath?”—Not very often does the final sentence of a film poignantly sum up its own essence. Based on a real-life story, this drama documentary focuses on the largest financial scandal of the twenty-first century and indeed the largest that Wall Street has ever known, which was perpetrated by the billionaire and financier Bernie Madoff (brilliantly acted by Robert de Niro).
While interviewing Madoff in his prison cell, the film's story is reconstructed by the New York Times journalist and author Diana B. Henriques (playing herself). For more than forty years this man, who was known as a spectacularly skilful trader, a higher being and god-like individual to his employees at Madoff Securities, was a mastermind at evading scrutiny while running a Ponzi scheme under a tight culture of secrecy. He did this by insisting that he needed to protect the “secret sauce” of his investing strategies to the extent that even business emails were forbidden in parts of the firm. This rule was adhered to so closely that very few emails from anyone at Madoff Securities were ever introduced at the trial of the five employees as evidence of the fraud. This was almost unheard of in contemporary white-collar criminal cases.
Apart from Madoff losing $65 billion dollars of the American public's savings and without going into much details into the indelible distrust engendered by his financial dealings, this drama is surprisingly sad and mournful. Madoff's financial fraud destroyed thousands of lives, yet the director chose to focus his attention on the calamitous after-effects and the way it wrecked his family, something that reads like a script from Greek tragedy, since it was his sons who had to bear the sins of their father. According to his family Madoff never told them the true nature of his businesses, literally keeping it in a separate compartment—on the seventeenth floor of the New York building belonging to Madoff Securities.
Two years on from the collapse of th