Review: The Big Short
You’ve seen this before. ‘A 2007 Crash course. Oy vey. That poor title’s been through the blog mill something sore since the financial crisis. Some thought they were the first; a fraction of those thought they were the only geniuses using it. I am of course number 1,000,000 so I get a free iPod Nano or something.
Adam McKay’s The Big Short will spark a second spike in pun abuse. And that’s fair enough since this Michael Lewis adaptation is the most clear film explanation of the crash we have thus far, though we’ll have a few more crashes to practice on. McKay and his men are legit concerned to help us all detect when the market starts pulling the wool over our eyes and the rug from our feet (not just the textiles market) and how it is irredeemably rigged to do so.
And it is basically all men. The Big Short stars lamp-lover Steve Carell (Foxcatcher), shouty magician Christian Bale (Rescue Dawn), pretty boy Ryan Gosling (Drive) and pretty man Brad Pitt (Tree of Life). This representation of Wall Street at first seems true-to-life but the movie immediately fails in shinning a light on its ‘Johns’. Then, maybe it makes sense that the real life non-Johns it’s based on were able to see the cracks in the system most Johns couldn’t, refused to &/or instigated.
The story picks up with Michael Burry, (Bale) M.D. turned hedge fund manager, whose eye for fine print sets him plumbing the guts of a fairly novel financial product around 2005. The other eye kid Burry lost playing football and his glass prosthetic’s left him socially-maladjusted, just not to the extent of sociopathy suffered by most of Wall Street subjects. In arduously scrutinising these ‘mortgage-backed securities’ he calculates that if a fraction of their higher risk homeowners default at an upcoming interest rate revision, we face Hiroshima on a house of cards. Burry drags his maladjustment and the bulk of all his Scion Capital’s fund to major banks and insurers, asking for a new product/derivative: the ‘credit default swap’. This product insures Scion against housing market collapse, his prediction the likes of Deutsche Bank openly laugh at (since every American house is dreamily built on a gooey foundation of apple pie, baseballs and cherry-blonde cheerleader bones). Interestingly, you’ll remember in The Prestige Bale played a magician thin on style but naturally gifted, with a knack for deconstructing the tricks of others to the brass tacks.
The spraytan mannequin played by Gosling is Deutsche trader Jared Vennett, who picks up and bets on this prediction. He’s also got the sleazeball bravado to extend a sale to Mark Baum’s (Carrell) crack team over at Bear Stearns. Vennett/Gosling operates as our nearly-Anchorman-goofy tour guide, breaking the 4th wall to introduce, for instance, Selena Gomez and economist Richard Thaler to explain ‘synthetic CDOs’.
Baum clearly hates his industry, which drove his brother to suicide. His rants against its systemic injustice aren’t only a second-hand redemption with the one he couldn’t talk down but also plain old, human ethicality. Baum and co. visit homeowners and the smaller bank sharks selling them untenable loans to see in flesh what Burry saw in spreadsheets. Ben Rickert (Pitt) is similar, but maybe a guy who straddled two splitting ages in US banking, now retired and jaded; like some kind of Dr Manhattan super-powered, gloomy blue ex-banker. The story’s plenty more dense than just this, so that’s as far as I go.
And that presents a major challenge: how do you make a movie about high finance affecting everybody FOR everybody or not as boring as it might seem? Fortunately, it’s not thick with obligatory vulture pans of guys intensely smashing keyboards to epiphany under beepbeep-ba-boopboop ‘serious-hacking-in-progress’ techno (though it’s alarming that economists, scientists or virologists haven’t given more thought to the ghkjhgdogdjhdgkjfjkhgfkh theorem). It’s tense. Who would’ve thought watching Baum pay for a lapdance just to quiz a dancer on the state of her seemingly stable household debt could feel like that penny-drop-eerie moment the hero uncovers the bomb 4 times larger and elsewhere than suspected? I think I’m thinking of John McClane or Clarice Starling unwittingly knocking at the right door.
Having an all-star cast helps and I find it exceptionally whack that Carrell isn’t up for the Academy’s Best Actor. Anyway, eventually Baum hears the catalogue of exactly what products one of the most evil guys is selling, boasting of how they’re designed to fail. Carrell gives you vertigo here, reminding me of anytime I’ve felt nauseous and some fiend maddeningly whispers dessert and deep-fried nothings in my ear. He is viscerally appalled.
It’s not all personality-driven however. At all times McKay and co-writer Charles Randolph (The Interpreter) try to keep the system in the crosshairs, a big ask. Not that our characters are totally pedestrian in the mechanics: Baum feels especially conflicted by his complicity in profit off destruction of families, whole communities, pensions, countries, etc. But other script whistle stops include the ratings agencies (maybe flat stupid symbolism that the lady at S&P was wearing near-opaque prescription lenses before a surgery, I mean, c’mon mayn) and the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Again, can’t stress enough, this looks a lot more dangerous on celluloid than a blog.
The Big Short bemoans our celebrity fetish and insatiable consumption of web as opportune distractions from what it describes as willfully obfuscating financial jargon and a global organized crime so big as to only seem possible in an apocalyptic blockbuster. Summary: trillions changed hands under our noses while we watched cats, celeb sex tapes and celeb cat sex tapes. The Big Short makes a fine go of fully engaging its audience, breastfed on full-throttle media hyper-real (no exception my end). Any rhythm too cosy with autopilot viewing is tripped up by 4th wall interaction or dissolves to quotes signposting the inevitable. In fact, the captions, photo streams of Americans you’ll never meet, the Margot Robbie and Selena/Thaler micro lecture interludes all might remind you of YouTube or web. 21st century media consumption isn’t circumvented but in part cleverly subsumed or operationalised, or something. Anyhow, this wide release’s unconventional style forestalls lazy escapism, respects you, educates you and entertains, albeit with a nagging sense of hell to pay and an axe to grind.
Outcome: 10/10
