There's a few questions that seem to inspire this film such as "How could no one in his family know about what he was doing?", "How could no one at the company suspect anything?", and "How did the government not catch this sooner?". The movie plays almost like a checklist for all those questions to provide answers other than "because he was a monster". In fact, my single biggest issue with the film is that it lets Bernie off the hook a little too much and has limited introspection on his part. Robert De Niro plays him well, but he ends up being more of a character in his own movie than the main character.
The film does a terrific job of pointing out the number of systemic failures in place that allowed this ponzi scheme to work. Basically, a lot of government agencies had to be really incompetent and a lot of businesses had to be willfully ignorant for it to get so out of control. People who should and shouldn't've known better got sucked in. This is a deception that started small and innocently enough. Madoff didn't devise a masterplan. He just broke a rule and didn't get caught, which emboldened him to break bigger and bigger rules.
There is a point when the movie gets far too caught up in telling everyone's story. Bernie is essentially forgotten toward the end so the movie could underline a point about how put upon his family was because of this. By the time the film ends by asking if Madoff is a sociopath, my response was "Oh, that's what this is supposed to be about?". It's like writing a term paper and writing a conclusion at the end about what you meant for the paper to be about rather than what the evidence you spent five pages presenting actually said.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
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