“My biggest fear is that someone will snore.”
The above statement comes from Marc Drier, the infamous lawyer convicted on charges of fraud and money laundering, while he’s contemplating life in a white-collar prison in the infuriatingly revealing new documentary Unraveled. Sitting in his penthouse apartment under house arrest, waiting for his sentencing date, he also says he hopes that he won’t have to do any manual labor there.
He probably won’t. But his spoiled attitude alone is evidence why minimum-security jail time isn’t enough deterrent for big-deal crooks like Drier (and Bernie Madoff, whose story overshadowed Drier’s back in Spring 2009). Sure, he won’t see his kids much and he won’t get to hobnob with celebrities anymore, but given his crime, basically an extreme sort of identity theft, he’ll be sitting relatively pretty.
That’s not the most frustrating thing about Drier or this film, which follows his final days as a semi-free man. Directed by one of Drier’s former employees, Marc H. Simon, Unraveled gets unprecedented access to one of the biggest villains of the financial crisis. It kind of reminds me of Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, which it turns out Simon acted in, and it’s also an interesting doc to compare with Werner Herzog’s latest, Into the Abyss, which it turns out Simon also worked on, as legal counsel.
