I generally try to catch pop cultural representations of securities law/business law issues; though I haven’t yet had a chance to see Billions, I did recently watch Madoff and 99 Homes.  So, my thoughts under the jump:

Madoff

Madoff felt very much as though it was telling the wrong story – and that it was far too long for the story it was telling.

The movie is told from Bernard Madoff’s point of view, and though it jumps around a bit in time, it takes place almost entirely after Madoff had already built up his fraudulent business (presumably to maximize the screen time of its star, Richard Dreyfuss). We learn very little about Madoff’s psychology; instead, we see him attract more and more investors and lie and scheme to avoid inquiries, until it all falls apart. And that’s the film.

The thing is, I don’t need a movie to tell me that Madoff bilked people and was eventually caught, and certainly not for four hours. That there are bad people the world who do bad things is, at least for me, sadly unremarkable. I’m more interested in how these problems develop, and how they come to flourish.

So, for example, I would have been interested in a story about how various institutions – including, apparently, investment banks like JP Morgan and Credit Suisse – allowed suspicious activity to flourish for years and turned a blind eye and/or failed to object. I would have been interested in more focus on the SEC, and how dysfunctions at the agency prevented it from catching the fraud despite numerous investigations of Madoff’s operations.

It might also have been interesting to see how Madoff was able to convince people to place billions of dollars with him. Dreyfuss’s Madoff is a very unattractive sort of guy, but if that were true of the real-life Madoff, he’d never have been as successful at swindling people. In fact, one reporter described how Madoff had a distinct charm, with a talent for convincing people that they were the most special, smart, interesting person in the room. None of that charisma came across in the Madoff movie. (And not for nothing, but I was deeply offended by the running suggestion that moral corruption at the heart of the Madoff clan manifested itself in the family’s history of cancer).

At the end of the movie, there are statements from real-life Madoff victims about the havoc wrought on their lives, but the gesture feels hollow; nothing else in the prior 3 hours and 45 minutes convinced us that the movie was particularly interested in who they were or how they felt. Instead, the movie is almost as narcissistic as Madoff himself, focusing nearly exclusively on his experience.

I suppose the film was entertaining in a mild sort of way, but at bottom, I’m not convinced that Madoff the man should have any of my attention. I’m more interested in the forces and people that surrounded Madoff, that created him and enabled him to flourish, and that’s not what this movie was about.

99 Homes

In contrast to Madoff, 99 Homes is very much about the forces that create evil and allow it to flourish. I saw this movie described as a “thriller” about the housing crisis, which is totally and completely not true. Yes, there is violence (certain characters are driven to desperation by their financial straits) but at bottom this is a psychological drama about the relationship between Rick Carver, a real estate broker who specializes in flipping foreclosed properties, and Dennis Nash, a freelance construction worker who loses his house and then finds himself coopted – financially and then morally – by the industry that devastated him.

Unlike Dreyfuss in Madoff, Michael Shannon’s Carver is a riveting, compelling figure, who alternately manipulates and intimidates the people around him into perpetuating a corrosive system. The movie meticulously documents the human turmoil caused by the housing collapse, and though it adopts a narrow, almost claustrophobic focus on a few small-time players, the larger failures loom, from a foreclosure system that leaves homeowners confused and voiceless, to a banking system that encourages reckless lending and borrowing. Carver in particular turns in a ferocious performance as a man who shaped himself into a devil to survive in a Hobbesian world.