MADOFF: The Monster of Wall Street
Netflix | ★★✩✩✩

I live by three rules; don’t eat after 8pm, stay hydrated, and beware documentaries that say: “There’s a bigger story here.” Even the hyperbolic title MADOFF: The Monster of Wall Street illustrates how Netflix doth protest too much.

Of course, to those who lost their life savings, Bernie Madoff was a monster, someone even deems him “pure evil”, but the real villain is far more insidious and benign, greed.

There’s Madoff’s greed — even running a hugely successful and legal multi-million dollar business wasn’t enough to prevent him also orchestrating a $65 billion Ponzi scheme. The greed of the few employees who knew what was going on and aided him.

The greed of other employees and possibly family who turned a blind eye. The greed of various financial institutions, which aren’t exactly strangers to making money out of nothing.

Arguably the entire system is a giant Ponzi scheme. And sadly, the greed of the victims, who remained compliant and grateful thanks to insane returns combined with Madoff’s brilliant tactic of threatening to kick out anyone who dared question him.

Over four hour-long episodes the entire story is meticulously laid out, but the reality is, apart from scale there’s nothing much here we haven’t seen before.

Netflix Madoff Promo Stills 018

Madoff and mates as portrayed by actors

The director Joe Berlinger, armed with an impressive budget and all the tools gathered from his previous work on serial killers, does his best to dress up his nebbishy open-faced subject in a terrifying costume.

But the more it pushes that angle, with slick sinister recreations, dramatic music, and even confessional footage of the prison-garbed man himself, the further we get from gaining any real insight into Madoff’s psyche.

Among the bogged-down rhetoric there are certainly a few interesting nuggets scattered about. A rabbi based in the exclusive area of Palm Beach where Madoff lived reveals the historical antisemitism of the area, and makes a connection to the shared Jewishness of Madoff and that of many of his victims.

With hotels into the 1960s bearing signs saying “No Jews”, the community were forced to care for one other, trust each other, so it became inconceivable one Jew would actively harm another.

That is, until Madoff appeared, making his clever utilisation of exclusivity even more bittersweet, with mere word-of-mouth recommendations necessary to keep the venture growing.

The frustration of law enforcement who suspected what was going on and couldn’t get the authorities to act is palpable, as is the agony felt by some of the victims who were made doubly so, with profits forcefully redistributed to lessen the pain of others.

With Jewish philanthropists affected, and even Holocaust survivors, it may feel apt that Madoff’s ultimate fate was dying in jail.

But one victim’s lament that Madoff’s cremated remains, sitting uncollected in a lawyer’s office, goes against Jewish tradition, is a more representative example of our people’s character than his crimes.

No matter how meticulously those crimes are laid out, the monster remains a mystery, if not merely just a human.