By Noel Vera
Movie Review
The Big Short
Directed by Adam McKay
ADAM MCKAY’S The Big Short — adapted from Michael Lewis’ book of the same name — is a disaster movie played for laughs, only in this case the disaster involves the entire US economy, and when the smoke clears and you have a chance to think about it there’s really not a lot to laugh about.
McKay tries his best though.
Have not read the book but judging from this and Moneyball, Lewis has the knack of turning complex unfriendly subject matter (usually involving statistics or some form of math) into compelling narrative (the Sandra Bullock version of his The Blind Side I have not seen — just the idea of a wealthy white housewife redeeming an at-risk black youth gives me the hives — but the book is a riveting account of the evolution of the offensive left tackle [and I know next to nothing about the sport; only found out from the book exactly what a tackle does]).
This is good material, excellent even, and to McKay’s credit he doesn’t do enough to screw it up. Oh, he adopts the worst possible visual style — the kind of jittery handheld camera that can give the unprepared viewer screaming migraines, plus a tendency to cut from face to face without letting the implications of their words describing rather involved financial shenanigans properly sink in (I’m guessing McKay is trying for the edgy look of the white-collar comedy The Office, which to be honest I’m not a big fan of either). Eventually you form an idea of the magnitude of the tsunami about to rise up and swallow the civilized world (helps if you followed the events as they actually unfolded) still wreaking havoc today (see China), and you can’t help but be appalled: Is our drive to self-destruction so powerful? Can they be that greedy? Are we this stupid?
To McKay’s credit he has an excellent cast of actors sinking their teeth into the story. Ryan Gosling’s Jared Vennett is the kind of sleekly dressed Aryan-looking Master of the Universe you ache to loathe (Gosling doesn’t disappoint); when he takes profit from our collective financial misery he’s ready with an insolent reply: “Who said I was the good guy?” Christian Bale as Scion hedge fund manager Michael Burry (the only character from the book to keep his real name onscreen) channels his inner Bruce Wayne to autistically focus on the subprime market’s default rate (he’s the first to sense impending doom and positions his fund early — a bit too early; he hadn’t counted on the possibility that the system would stay afloat on the sheer force of its momentum [or ignorance, or corruption] long after his set deadline date [second quarter of 2007], and his investors understandably panic).
Steve Carell’s Mark Baum is practically the only one of these risk-taking profiteers (and they were taking risks; if the economy hadn’t tanked they would have been on the hook for hundreds of millions) who actually seems to care for the potential casualties (the borrowers who were either misinformed or didn’t even know enough English to understand what they were getting into; the mutual fund investors who never realized they were sitting on a real estate nuclear-sized device), and for most of the film his apparently out-of-proportion moral indignity at all the complacent cupidity around him is funny… until it isn’t. Then he seems more like a somber Prophet of Doom who takes little consolation from the fact that his predictions have come true.
I can see the thought process of the filmmakers that led them into turning this into a comedy: probably the only way to make this much information palatable, much less entertaining; perhaps the best way to retain audience interest despite practically everyone knowing the grim ending. The movie would make an interesting companion piece to Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street — which doesn’t take up the story of the Great Recession (involving “pump-and-dump” scams, or the pressured sale of penny stocks) but does illuminate the callous recklessness, monstrous egotism, and basic dishonesty of stock brokers and fund managers in general. Call The Big Short McKay’s Schindler’s List to Scorsese’s Downfall: the movie doesn’t look at the victims of the Holocaust so much as the smart handful who survived (Scorsese focuses on the perpetrators, or at least folks with a similar mind-set).
Could also imagine Stanley Kubrick directing a film — as far as “Plans That Go Wrong” are concerned, this has the scale of suffering and irony to go near the top of his list. Arguably he has directed the film: Dr. Strangelove depicted not The End of Our Economy but The End of the World, with plenty of dark humor and an inimitably precise visual style (and no handheld cameras… well maybe once, during the Burpleson Base attack).
Scorsese has done his version however flawed; Kubrick alas is unavailable. What we have is this: a sincere stab at the issue that draws a fair amount of blood, provokes a fair amount of remembered pain. You take what dramatization you can get, I suppose, and hope — with the viewing of this picture and with more vigilance on our part — that it doesn’t happen again. MTRCB Rating: R-13
