BY MIRIAM RINN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

The most interesting shot in Jeff Prosserman’s “Chasing Madoff” may be of Bernard Madoff himself. The silver-haired financial “wizard” lounges comfortably in a chair, amusing the surrounding crowd with his observations on the fallacies of the financial markets. He’s funny, confident, and charming; why would anyone doubt him? Then we see Harry Markopolos, earnest and awkward and self-righteous, repeat yet again that he warned the Securities and Exchange Commission ten years before Madoff’s final fall that the hedge-fund manager was a crook, that his astonishing returns were a fantasy, that Bernie Madoff was running the largest and longest-lasting Ponzi scheme ever.

It may be as simple as that: Madoff’s cool quotient is so much higher than Markopolos’ that no one wanted to spend much time with the geekier guy and look at his charts and spreadsheets. They wanted to hang with the handsome financier wearing the expensive suits, the guy who seemed to have the secret to success.

I wish Prosserman, who wrote, produced, and directed this documentary film based on Markopolos’s book No One Would Listen, had taken a step back and considered the difference in style between the two men. But we can’t complain that a filmmaker didn’t make a different movie; we have to judge what was done. “Chasing Madoff” is a tedious, repetitive film that won’t reveal much new to anyone who followed the Madoff case in the newspapers except the extent of Markopolos’s self-aggrandizement and obsession. Filled with re-enactments, cheesy effects, and endless interviews with Markopolos and his much sleeker partner Frank Casey, “Chasing Madoff” has the feel of a vanity production. There are too many irrelevant scenes of Markopolos’s parents, children, Catholic high school, and small town home in Massachusetts to make sense, otherwise. Do we really need to see Harry taking his sons for a walk in the woods, talking to them about predators and prey? That touching scene might be appropriate for a retirement party or a donors’ gala, but “Chasing Madoff” is supposedly a serious nonfiction film.

CLICK HERE FOR "CHASING MADOFF" MOVIE TRAILER

When Harry Markopolos was a derivatives portfolio manager at Ramparts Investment Management, his boss asked him to match the returns of renowned options trader Bernie Madoff. Madoff was rumored to have some secret formula that never lost money. After running the numbers, Markopolos came to the conclusion that Madoff had to be a fraud — no one never lost money in the equities market. It was impossible. Markopolos eventually took his findings to the SEC, the government agency that is supposed to protect the integrity of the financial markets. The SEC began several investigations, but they never came to anything. Why not? Maybe the SEC lawyers thought that Markopolos was less than a disinterested party. Maybe Madoff bought them off in one way or another. One of the lead SEC attorneys married Madoff’s niece, after all. Maybe they were incompetent or distracted. Maybe they thought Markopolos was just too weird to take seriously. Or, and this is the film’s implication, maybe Madoff and his cronies threatened their lives and the safety of their families, and they were too frightened to do anything.