The Big Short ★★★★★
Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt and Steve Carrell predict the (upcoming) 2008 financial crash and, for reasons ranging from selfishness to revenge, decide to profit from it.
The Big Short frequently reminded me that I don’t really know what happened during the financial crash of 2008, and it’s true. I don’t. And despite the best efforts by this film to explain why it happened — and it does so well, I might add — I’m not hugely much the wiser. I followed the film’s plot and I know how all the corruption pieces together, but it’s oh so convoluted. That’s probably the point though, and how everybody got away with it; at least the cameos by Margot Robbie and Selena Gomez were distractedly hilarious if not transparently educational.
That doesn’t stop it from being thoroughly engaging though, and as I just mentioned there’s enough exposition to allow even the most un-economically minded audience to follow. What I didn’t realise going into the film was that there are three different stories here, and aside from the obvious financial connection they don’t really connect with one another. Ryan Gosling’s character works for a bank but sees the crash coming because Christian Bale’s character works it out well in advance and tries to capitalise on it. Brad Pitt is actually just a neighbour to two entrepreneurs who find (admittedly inaccurately) Bale’s character’s document. Gosling tells Carrell, who also tries to profit (for the least selfish reason). Outside of this connection, they’re all separate narratives.
There’s something very entertaining about knowing how a story will end, and just waiting for that big moment to happen. It gives everything a very ‘personal’ dimension. Every character suffers setbacks along the way and somehow it’s still possible to worry about how they’ll get out of their situations. And these are still investors and bankers, remember; even Ryan Gosling’s smarmy Vennett is endearing in an insulting, over-polishedkind of way. Speaking of which: he’s the funny one of the movie, and Steve Carrell plays the angry one. Everyone is on top form.
This is a film about something everybody already knows about, and on paper it’s not even that crazy of a true story: people foresaw the financial crash and made money from it. The global impact could have meant a film more ‘epic’ in scale, and the subject matter certainly could have veered towards the boring. But somehow The Big Short manages to remain grounded through its central characters, all whilst highlighting how slimy and deplorable everyone around them in that industry is.
In an extraordinarily entertaining way.
