Bernie Madoff and Vito Corleone Have Much More In Common Than Just Robert De Niro

Both men rose from the streets of New York to positions of great wealth and power. Both men were elite criminals. And each man’s sins eventually rained down on his family, especially his sons.

And both men have been played by one of America’s great actors: Robert De Niro.

De Niro plays the famous Wall Street swindler Bernie Madoff in HBO’s The Wizard of Lies, which premieres on HBO tonight. Thirty years ago this film – directed by Barry Levinson, co-starring Michelle Pfeiffer – would have been an instant Oscar contender with its ripped-from-reality dramatic arc. Now, well, there are no wisecracking raccoons, the leads are older and it’s yet another (yawn) movie about high finance gone bad, so it ends up on HBO.

Except The Wizard of Lies is far from yawnland. The high finance mumbo-jumbo stays in the background and what’s made clear early on is that Madoff, a well-respected man handling billions of dollars of other people’s money, is pulling a massive con with the help of his uneducated, crude right- hand man, Frank Dipascali (a wonderfully wormy Hank Azaria). They’re supposed to be investing people’s money; instead they’re just spending it.

And they’re hiding this all so well that neither Madoff’s loyal wife Ruth (Pfeiffer) nor his two grown sons – Mark (Alessandro Nivola) and Andrew (Nathan Darrow) – know what’s going on, even though the sons work for Madoff’s firm.

De Niro plays Madoff as something of a deluded, amoral sociopath, albeit a deluded, amoral sociopath who values both family and loyalty. As it becomes obvious his ship is sinking, Madoff hurries to write bonus checks to loyal employees who are about to find out how bad things really are.

It’s that mix of loyalty, criminality and family that harkens back more than 40 years to one of De Niro’s earliest roles, the role that drew America’s attention and won his first Oscar: Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II.

In that film, the young immigrant wrongly named by officials as Vito Corleone kills his first man (a mobster) and effectively takes over organized crime in Little Italy and, ultimately, beyond. He is a doting father and reliable husband but he’s also vengeful and ruthless.

This prequel story of the young Vito sets in motion the dark turns that fuel both The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. And as successful as Vito becomes – beloved in his community, a pillar of sage advice and charity – the violence behind his success comes back to haunt him and his family.

First the senior Vito (Marlon Brando) is gunned down in the street, an assassination attempt. Then his good-hearted son Michael (Al Pacino), the one Corleone who hopes to stay away from the family business, retaliates for the botched assassination, killing a high-ranking cop in the process.

After Michael is spirited away to Italy, hot-headed son Sonny (James Caan) is riddled with bullets and killed at a highway toll booth. When Don Corleone passes away from natural causes Michael is well on his way to becoming an unfeeling monster. In The Godfather Part II he actually has his one remaining brother, Fredo (the incomparable John Cazale) killed.

So much for family and loyalty.

It doesn’t work out well for the Madoffs, either. It’s perhaps telling that between the mobster and the investment guru, the mobster comes off as the far more sympathetic character. Yes, Madoff is a real person who ruined the lives of countless other real people, and that’s surely part of it. And nobody’s much enamored with Wall Street swindlers these days.

But both De Niro and Brando made Vito Corleone a man of strength and honor, a noble warrior of sorts. There is no nobility to Bernie Madoff in The Wizard of Lies, just deception and arrogance.

He subtly and not-so-subtly bullies his sons, his wife, even one granddaughter. He has built an enormous house of cards that’s sure to come down but waits until the very last minute to tell his family what he’s done, leaving them stunned, shamed and ill-prepared.

Again consequences play out across the family. An obligatory spoiler alert should probably be inserted here, but the Madoff story was national news as it played out. These are hardly secrets.

Ruth, Mark and Andrew Madoff became immediate social pariahs, hated by the many friends and business associates Bernie took money from, haunted by constant press intrusions. Bernie went off to a white collar jail. His family hid out behind drawn curtains, getting threatening phone calls and watching as creditors came after their possessions.

The big speculation was that the family knew all along. According to The Wizard of Lies, they didn’t. But the pressure and shame weighed so heavily on Mark that he committed suicide. Andrew Madoff had apparently beaten cancer before the scandal broke; afterward the cancer returned and he too died. A broke, disheartened Ruth goes off to live with a sister – who Bernie had stolen money from.

Most films rely on some sort of family dynamics, whether the family is a bunch of goofy space marauders or a gang of hot rod drivers or an actual family. And father-son dynamics factor heavily in everything from Finding Nemo to that story about the Skywalker kid.

But few actors of De Niro’s range – and it’s true that range has been mishandled over the past two decades – find themselves in career bookend performances that resonate this way. These are two roles that say there is nothing more powerful, or potentially destructive, than parenting.

Wizard Of Lies premieres on Saturday, May 20 at 8pm ET.

Tom Long is a longtime culture critic who writes regularly for The Detroit News. He’s also an absolutely terrible guitarist.

Watch Wizard Of Lies on HBO Go or HBO Now