Movie Review: "The Big Short"

The Big Short (2015); Best Movie Oscar nominee

R

4 Stars out of 5

Director                                Adam McKay (Oscar nominee)
Writer                                   Charles Randolph, Adam McKay, (Oscar Winner, Best Adapted Screenplay)
Book                                      Michael Lewis – “The Big Short – Inside the Doomsday Machine” (2010)
Editor                                    Hank Corwin (Oscar nominee)
Music                                    Nicholas Britell 

Ryan Gosling                       Jared Vennett
Christian Bale                      Michael Burry, M.D. (Oscar nominee for Supporting Actor)
Steve Carrell                       Mark Baum
John Magaro                       Charlie Geller
Finn Wittrock                      Jamie Shipley
Cameos                                Anthony Bourdain, Selena Gomez, Margot Robbie

 

What would be the proper tone for a movie that explored the 2007/2008 market collapse in the United States? Would it be comical, fast paced, satirical, and salted with celebrities explaining the various arcane terms of credit default swap or collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)? I would not have made these choices, but in fact this was exactly the tone intentionally chosen by writer Charles Randolph and writer/director Adam McKay in 2015’s “The Big Short”. This movie is particularly fast-paced and filled with people speaking a language that sounds like English as they attempt to explore the fraud and incompetence displayed by a variety of large banking institutions in the first decade of the new millennium. The writing, editing and acting are superb though some of the choices in music and the use of cameos quite frankly detract rather than add to this film. And, I wonder how many viewers will walk away from this movie with a better understanding of what was done by the bankers vs. simply an uneasy feeling that the crooks involved got away with it, and have virtually nothing in their way from doing it all over again.

“The Big Short” focuses on three story lines that somewhat, kind a reach the same end point – and it’s not really the end point any of the three groups thought or hoped it would be. The story begins with Dr. Michael Burry (Christiane Bale) , a former neurologist now Hedge Fund manager that seems to suffer from Asperger-like symptoms. His social skills may be problematic but not his intellect. By dint of his intuition and hard work he finds evidence that the real estate bond market, thought to be extremely safe is anything but. Evidently, it is necessary to fill these bonds with a large number of mortgages. If said mortgages are 30 year mortgages made out to fully-employed workers that have been properly vetted for their loans, no problem. If on the other hand the bond is filled with people not vetted properly or perhaps not at all, and if they hold multiple loans, variable rate loans, then Burry rightly deduces a disaster is on the way. He makes the decision to persuade several banks to create a financial instrument that from one point of view is a form of insurance on the bonds, and from Burry’s point view allows him to “short” the real estate bonds in question. That is to say, he pays a monthly premium that allows him to “bet” the value of those bonds will drop once a certain percentage of the mortgage holders default on their home loans. And Burry’s data says this will happened in the 2Q07; that is about two quarters away in time from his decision to short the bond market.

One of the amazing aspects of Burry’s plan is that his contact with the banks to set up the short is overheard by another banker, Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling). Vennett’s own research and experience at his bank tell him quite quickly that Burry is right. Vennett then goes about trying to sell the short financial tool to other investors; all turn him down except for another Hedge Fund manager, Mark Baum (Steve Carrell). Baum is a man beset with anxiety at the greed and disregard of Wall Street – even though he works there, too. Baum’s team starts to buy up as much of Vennett’s product as they can afford. And lastly, a pair of naïfs, Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) find out about Vennett’s plan and decide with the help of an experienced and connected trader, Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) to start their own run at shorting the real estate bond market.

Where this movie sets itself apart from other tales from Wall Street (e.g. “Wolf of Wall Street”, 2013) is that there is no glorification of these traders, there are no heroes in this tale, and no drunken or drug-induced frenzies. Instead, we have a cast of capable people, each with at least a residue of conscience left that are faced with the apparent fact that Wall Street is run by extremely venal and in some cases, completely clueless parasites. Some of the members of the three groups that short the banks are shown to be concerned from the beginning (Baum and Rickert) with the awful system they work in or they get there by the movie’s end (Baum is even more discouraged, Burry closes his fund, and young Charlie moves to a farm). Yes there is comedy and satire in this movie, but mostly there is just a sense of disgust and a feeling that the wealth Wall Street commands, and their reach into congress as a result of that wealth will prevent any meaningful legislation ever being passed, let alone enforced. Consider the movie’s closing comments: only one banker was imprisoned, and Wall Street has since introduced a clone of the CDOs that got the country (indeed the whole world) into the problems of the Great Recession of 2008 in the first place. History will surely repeat itself.

As a movie, this one excels primarily with the acting, directing and editing. The director and his editor do an incredible job of creating a tone and pace that propels this movie forward at a pace that is at times frantic, but not to the degree that the viewer is totally lost. The Oscar award notwithstanding, the writing upon which this movie is anchored has problems in my opinion: the inclusion of the celebrity cameos is pointless and detracts from the narrative flow. There seems little purpose in having a soap opera star (Margot Robbie) sit in a bubble-filled bath tub defining financial terms to the masses. I get it is intended to create an atmosphere of arrogance and superiority, but it really feels more like a derailment from the story-line. It is true that telling this story without a careful explanation of the financial terms in play would also detract from the film, but the Robbie cameo was a mistake in my opinion. The use of Selena Gomez placing a bet in a casino as she explains what CDOs are, worked much better – her explanation about the CDO style of gambling placed in the context of her losing at Blackjack was a great metaphor and did not deviate much from the tone or pace of the overall movie.

But the acting, this is where I think the movie has its best moments. Christian Bale’s performance of the one-eyed and smartest man in the room, who is also a likely Asperger’s patient, is a brilliant idea. Here is a man who has lived his life minus an eye, has struggled with his social interactions, and yet is the only one in the room that truly sees the problem that the CDOs were. He plays his character as a man living on the edge of main stream society pounding on his drums as he listens to some heavy metal music that only he can hear. Again, the metaphors are as clear as possible. My big objection to the musical choice though is that Music Director Nicholas Britell would have benefitted the movie immensely had he decided to use Led Zepplin throughout the movie rather than just as a closing number. The raucous, heart-pounding effect would have been the same, but the music far better written, performed, and recognizable to the audience. Lastly, the acting of Steve Carrell just gets better and better. His performance of the guilt-wracked Mark Baum as he works through the suicide of his brother and the same time tries to fix every wrong in the world (no doubt as he tries to salve his sense of guilt over the loss of his brother) is in fact better than his Oscar nominated performance in 2014 of John DuPont in “Foxcatcher”. He is able to capture with great subtlety a range of emotions a Mark Baum, most notably his closing sense of futility – surely the best emotion for anyone watching this movie and thinking about how Wall Street (and the corporations) run things from behind the curtains.

In any event, this is a good movie. I do not think I would have nominated it for Best Picture, but I strongly agree with the director, editing and acting nominations – they are well deserved.  This movie tells a complicated tale about greed and financial control that I think every thinking American needs to ponder. It uses a comedic tone that I find more annoying than entertaining; certainly it detracts from the message in my view. But then how does one tell a story about the dismal science (i.e. economics) without putting the audience to sleep. Maybe this was the perfect tone; it was a perfect pace and some near perfect acting. I recommend this movie, but I think with some reservations.