Jeremy’s Tophunder №11: The Big Short
I’ve seen The Big Short probably 10 or 12 times. I’m still not totally sure I actually get how the U.S. housing market (and subsequently, the world economy) crashed, but I think I’m starting to figure it out.
I think it speaks volumes about the movie that it took me that many viewings before I really understood what was going on, and yet I still love it. Perhaps it’s not the movie’s fault — obviously there were a lot of factors that went into the worst economic crisis of the last eighty years, way more than you can fit into a two hour movie that is also trying to be funny and entertaining.
And The Big Short is all of those things. It’s crazy, convoluted, confusing at times, but then also at times hysterical, fascinating, and certainly never boring. The common criticism among movies that are based on true stories is that they take creative licence with the story to make it more movie-friendly. According to most people in the know, the movie made use of opportunistic dialogue to streamline the explanation of the complex financial ideas, but, in reality, that’s about it. This group of people (some names were changed) did short the housing market, they were (to some extent) the only ones to see the collapse coming, and there was massive fraud and/or stupidity on the part of the investment banks and ratings agencies. It gets the facts across, and that’s probably one of the reasons why it was hard for me to follow at first — they weren’t dumbing down the financial jargon.
The strength of the movie is in it’s performances. Christian Bale is great as the awkward and eccentric Michael Burry — he once again shows that he’s one of the few actors capable of truly disappearing into a role. I watched Batman Begins just a few days ago, and The Big Short today, and it’s like watching two different people. Ryan Gosling is also great; he’s funny, he’s arrogant, and he also serves the important role of the movie’s narrator. Brad Pitt also disappears into his role, and offers a nice straight-man persona in contrast with the two young investors he works with, played here by John Magaro and Finn Wittrock (who have had surprisingly quiet careers since). I wasn’t overly impressed with Steve Carell (perhaps I just didn’t enjoy his accent), but he played really nicely against the other members of his team (Jeremy Strong, Rafe Spall, and Hamish Linklater), all of whom put in strong work.
Ultimately, it’s a movie about people, in a room, talking. Mostly about complicated financial stuff. It’s hard to make that fun. It depends on the cast being energetic, and it depends on the story being engaging. The story was the easy part — it’s a bunch of outsiders trying to take down the big banks for billions of dollars. To some extent, they lucked out with the cast. It wasn’t exactly a big budget movie; being able to get Carell and Bale and Gosling and Pitt was a big deal. Even more so when you consider (a) Adam McKay was directing his first “serious” movie ever, as well as his first movie that didn’t star Will Ferrell, and (b) Pitt, Bale, and Gosling had never worked with McKay before. Usually, when a star-studded ensemble cast gets together for a movie like this, it’s because it’s a high-profile, universally-respected director. Like, don’t get me wrong, Adam McKay is one of my favorites, and he’s clearly proven over the last five years that he can put together Oscar-caliber movies, but he didn’t quite have that kind of cachet when The Big Short was being shopped around Hollywood in 2014.
There are two things that keep the movie, well, moving. The first is that it’s broken up into several different storylines. There’s the Carell/Gosling line, there’s the Christian Bale line, and there’s the Pitt & The Kids line. Alternating between them keeps each of them fresh. The other is the wonderful use of non-sequiturs. There’s Margot Robbie in a bubble bath telling us how Mortgage-Backed Securities work. There’s Anthony Bourdain (RIP) explaining what exactly a CDO is in the middle of Ryan Gosling’s sales pitch. And then there’s Richard Thaler and Selena Gomez explaining how the secondary market on all of these bonds explodes into billions of dollars worth of trades while Steve Carell meets with a CDO manager. It’s honestly a brilliant stroke — finding a simple (and funny) way to explain the more complicated details that are necessary to understanding the broader point of the movie.
A lazier movie would have just thrown it into the dialogue of a scene, having one person go “wait, what’s a Mortgage-Backed Security?” and another person explaining what a MBS is, when in reality, they would be saying “you have -this- job and you don’t know what a MBS is?” That type of lazy exposition always drives me insane. McKay finding a way to dance around that part is probably my favorite part of the movie.
It’s a bit strange to have a movie where the three biggest stars never share a scene. Somehow it still works. The chemistry between Carell and his team is great. They’re all cynical and bitter and jaded, and they feed off each other’s negativity. Then Gosling comes in and turns everything up to 11. Pitt has great chemistry with the two kids from Brownfield — their youthful exuberance and his reserved authority. Bale is the only one that doesn’t really get other “name” actors to bounce off of. His main investor, Lawrence Fields, is played by Tracy Letts, probably best known for writing August, Osage County (for which he won a Pulitzer Prize).
While my favorite scene in the movie is probably Ryan Gosling’s sales pitch to Steve Carell and his team (linked above), the most important scene in the movie is when Brad Pitt chastises the kids for celebrating after pulling off a huge trade. At first you think he’s just being the exasperated old guy with a stick up his butt, but once he starts actually talking you start to understand the gravity of the situation. When Jamie says “woah, I just got really scared,” that’s how you’re supposed to feel. You’ve spent the whole movie rooting for this handful of loosely connected underdogs to take advantage of the big banks for hundreds of millions of dollars (or more). But then you realize that if (and when) they win, the other side of the coin is the crash of the world economy. While there were a handful of people that came out the other side smelling like roses, there were millions, if not billions of people that saw their financial security disappear. Yeah, it’s scary to think about.
There’s so much stuff layered into The Big Short that turns what could otherwise be a mediocre movie into one of the most fun re-watches of the last 10 years. Beyond the celebrity cameos, there’s random other footage spliced into important scenes, like a Ludacris music video cutting in and out while Christian Bale buys his shorts at every bank on Wall Street. There are jokes made by characters breaking the fourth wall in the middle of scenes, and obviously Ryan Gosling’s narration is fantastic as well. It’s the absurdist streak that transforms The Big Short from a high-stakes financial drama (which could still be good, but could also be a snoozefest) into a bizarre black comedy (but still holds onto the high stakes drama). It’s really a phenomenal movie, and it’s my 11th-favorite movie ever.
(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)
Here’s our progress on the list so far:
6. The Fugitive
11. The Big Short
17. Ocean’s 11
24. Apollo 13
31. The Lost World: Jurassic Park
45. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
47. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
67. Batman Begins
76. Finding Nemo
85. Seabiscuit
93. The Truman Show
