In the hands of any other director and screenwriters, this could have been one of the most boring movies of 2015. A nearly month-by-month look at how the financial collapse of 2008 came to be with all the technical talks and explanations of Wall Street words included, you’d think it would be easier just to read the book that the film is based on.
But with filmmaker Adam McKay at the wheel—yes, that’s the Adam McKay of “Anchorman” and “Step Brothers” fame—it’s one of the most interesting, most well laid out and most entertaining history lessons in years.
The screenplay by McKay and Charles Randolph takes the book by Michael Lewis, gives it a modern Hollywood makeover and delivers a smart, funny and honest look at one of the biggest world screw-ups in the past 30 years.
And it’s all done with incredible performances and a style I can only describe as tongue-in-cheek, documentary-within-a-documentary brilliance that makes its case in the first five minutes and doesn’t let up for the next two hours.
When four Wall Street outsiders saw what the big banks and government refused to—the global collapse of the economy—they had an idea: The Big Short.
Michael Burry (played by Christian Bale) is an eccentric ex-physician who believes that the U.S. housing market is built on a bubble that will burst within the next few years. The banks believe that Burry is a crackpot and therefore are confident that it won’t, taking Burry’s offer to bet against the market with 10:1 odds.
Jared Vennett (played by Ryan Gosling) gets wind of Burry’s plan and believes he too can cash in on Burry’s beliefs. When an errant telephone call gets this information to Mark Baum (played by Steve Carell), an idealist fed up with the corrupt financial industry, Baum and his comrades decide to join forces with Vennett. They soon discover that most of the mortgages are overrated by the bond agencies, with the banks collating all the sub-prime mortgages under fraudulent packages.
Charlie Geller and Jamie Shipley, minor players in a start-up garage company, accidentally get a hold of Vennett’s pamphlet on the deal. Wanting in on the action, but not having the official clout to play, they decide to call an old “friend,” a retired investment banker Ben Rickert (played by Brad Pitt), to help.
When all their investment against the American economy lead them into the dark truths of modern banking where they must question everyone and everything, Burry, Vennett, Baum and Rickert soon realize that if they’re correct, the entire world economic system will fail.
And guess what happened: they were right.
All four of the main stars are excellent and all their supporting characters are excellent, too. There’s no point going into much more on that except to say their performances are real, honest and extremely funny and heartbreaking at the same time.
Bale’s is probably the most critically impressive—he is the one getting all the acting nominations for this movie this season. However, it’s safe to say the entire cast delivers perfectly in every scene.
But what makes this movie even more impressive and memorable than just a regular fact-based bio-drama is the style and approach in which it was made. First, the cinematography and editing are done in a documentary style along the lines of “The Office” or “Parks and Recreation.”
Except it’s almost a documentary within a documentary because the actors regularly break the fourth wall and address the audience directly in order to comment on the scene they’re in.
There are times when they discuss financial stuff no regular person will understand. And so they have celebrities like Margot Robbie, Anthony Bourdain and Selena Gomez explain it in the simplest language that middle school students could understand. It’s all those tongue-in-cheek deliveries and mockumentary style approaches that make the film’s point in the perfect way.
If a bunch of entertainers and comedians can explain how the housing bubble burst and the banks failed in a funny way so any average joe can understand it…how did none of the Wall Street moguls and doctors of economics in the government see it coming?
In the end though, everyone loses, which was the sad reality of the situation. We root for these guys to show up the big banks and make their billions of dollars by proving them wrong, and they do. But the only way they do that is by the economy failing and thousands of people losing their jobs and homes. So does it make the heroes the bad guys?
The movie never tells us what to think or how to feel, leaving it up for each audience member to decide. It’s ambitious in its execution, and its fearlessness to expose the truth behind what really happened is refreshing. Although it’s lighthearted throughout, even though it is a drama, the feelings you do get at the end are not what you’d expect for the director/writer of “Anchorman” and “Step Brothers.”
There are no solutions, and there are no answers. In the end, you’ll feel empty, confused or full of rage. And at that moment, the film will have done its job.
Quigley Films Unlimited 