Outrage can be expressed in different ways. There have been many sober books and an angry, analytical documentary — Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning 2010 “Inside Job” — about the subprime mortgage debacle and ensuing global financial crisis. J.C. Chandor’s 2011 drama “Margin Call” then took us inside the Wall Street collapse. This year, as the economy has improved for some (the haves, not the have-nots), we saw Ramin Bahrani’s “99 Homes,” which illustrated Florida’s boom-and-bust. And now comes an entirely novel approach — the madcap comedy of Adam McKay, best known for the “Anchorman” movies and Funny or Die videos made with Will Ferrell. If this seems inappropriate, remember that the Marx brothers’ “Duck Soup” can be understood as a comedy about war and fascism.
To be sure, “The Big Short” has its roots in Michael Lewis’ serious financial reporting for his 2010 book of that name, a typically smart chronicle of several investors who bet against the housing boom. Yet McKay still faces the challenge of relating a lot of esoteric financial detail. (The complexity, as many have noted, was partly a way of avoiding the scrutiny of regulators, journalists, and institutional investors who should’ve known better.) Those toxic CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) and bundled bond tranches McKay will later explain in zesty terms. First, however, he introduces three separate teams who begin to doubt the solidity of the housing market — which proves to be two teams too many.
1) In California, eccentric money manager Michael Burry (Christian Bale) is essentially a team of one: heavy-metal drummer, non-practicing neurologist, and probably a high-functioning Asperger’s case. His focus on the junk — subprime mortgages bundled into securities — that Wall Street is peddling makes him an enormously unpopular contrarian. Bale’s tightly hidden smile, however, indicates that Burry would be happy in no other place. He’s an obsessive who’s surrendered to his obsession, an OCD total-focus pariah.
In New York, we have 2) successful but neurotic hedge-fund manager Mark Baum (Steve Carell), who’s no stranger to shorting (i.e., betting against prevailing market sentiment). He and his team are being wooed by cheerfully smarmy banker Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling, regularly breaking the proscenium to help narrate the story of how “a few outsiders and weirdos saw what no one else could”). New to Wall Street are 3) an affable pair of tyro money managers (Finn Wittrock and John Magaro) who get financial backing from ornery retired banker/disaster-prepper Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt, beard gone gray, wearing his father’s aviator glasses from the 1970s).
There is much to entertain here as McKay, the merry ringmaster, zips us from one piece of the puzzle solving to the next. (“The Big Short” is in some sense a detective story, only no one finally goes to jail.) Mark’s team interviews strippers and investigates forlorn Florida cul-de-sacs with alligators snapping in the fetid pools. Arrogant bankers — oh, how this movie hates bankers! — laugh in Michael’s face when he purchases credit default swaps from them — a bet on a housing downturn that they believe will never happen. Cranky old Ben behaves like Howard Hughes, both encouraging his two Colorado minions and heaping contempt upon the whole rotten system.
All three teams were correct in retrospect, we know, but as Ben sternly explains, their triumph (and huge profit) means financial disaster for millions of ordinary Americans: economic suffering, bankruptcy, even death. When Burry warns of the mortgage market, “It’s a time bomb,” we know that bomb will eventually explode and cause great carnage. (When the teams visit a 2007 mortgage-banking conference in Vegas, sharp eyes will see a Washington Mutual booth.)
And it’s that foreknowledge that can make McKay’s comedy burn like bile in your throat, however zany the tone. Full of side notes and direct address, “The Big Short” will suddenly stop to say of some arcane financial instrument, “Here’s Margo Robbie in a bubble bath to explain.”
Along with “Carol” (period plea for gay rights) and “Concussion” (indictment of the NFL), “The Big Short” is one of the few big holiday movies with something important to say. Though it comes late to the subprime bonfire and is scattered in its storytelling, it settles on a proper note of disgust (sometimes a cause of laughter). McKay takes a looser, bro-ier approach than Lewis, but his lessons need to be sold differently at the multiplex. The mass audience isn’t made of financial analysts or hedge funders; it’s made of the folks whom Wall Street swindled, who lost their homes, their credit ratings, their 401(k)s, and their jobs.
And McKay, in his very broad American way, knows and respects those people. That’s why he concludes his movie with angry speeches and dire warnings. Banks won’t admit fault; they’ll just “blame immigrants and poor people” for taking out all those loans. A postscript reminds us that just one banker in an entire industry went to jail. Wall Street ducks meaningful regulation, again. The homeless are living under freeway ramps. And the final toll is $5 trillion lost, eight million jobs, six million homes. Unusually and admirably for a professional funnyman, McKay ends his film not with a punch line, but with a punch to the gut.
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