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.

Movie Review: The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life (2011)

Four and half Stars out of Five

PG13

Mr. O’Brien (Father): Brad Pitt

Mrs. O’Brien (Mother): Jessica Chastain

Adult Jack: Sean Penn

Young Jack: Hunter McCracken

Director/Writer: Terrence Malick

Cinematography Director:  Emmanuel  Lubezki

Music: Alexandre Desplat

Film Editing: Hank Corwin et. al.

Terrence Malik has directed six movies with “The Tree of Life” being his fifth. His topics have ranged from John Smith and Pocahontas (“The New World”), to WWII (“The Thin Red Line”), to romance (“Days of Heaven”), to a romantic art film (“To The Wonder”). “The Tree of Life” has its own genre, one not usually seen in Hollywood: religious/philosophical/nostalgic.  “The Tree of Life” has been widely praised (it is on many Top 100 lists, won the Palme D’Or in Cannes, and is listed as the best picture ever by several critics), and widely panned. It is one of the most ambitious movies I have ever seen, but perhaps in a final analysis, it is a little too ambitious with its message.

The movie is told in four parts: the death of the O’Brien family’s second son, RL; the birth of the universe and of life on Earth; the birth and early life of Jack O’Brien (the first born child of the O’Brien’s) in Waco Texas, and a slice of time in the middle-aged years of Jack. The seemingly unrelated segments are linked by the philosophical and religious underpinnings to this story. The underpinnings at first glance seem to reduce to the eternal question: what is God’s intent with respect to Man. But then it has a second philosophical question to address: what is Man’s intent and his means with respect to Life.

The first question is strongly alluded to with a quote from the Bible’s Book of Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth? When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for Joy?” Throughout this movie, various players within the movie are overheard asking questions, apparently to God the Father, but conceivably in some cases to their own father or mother. There is within the story’s overall structure a frequent sense of being disconnected from a powerful, perhaps loving parental figure. There is a near constant questing for answers, for a sense of understanding to the question of why we are here, and where are we going. The second part of the story, the part that depicts the formation of solar systems and then of life, provides a literal answer on the “how” of why-we-are-here, but of course leaves the “why” question unanswered. Near the end of the film as the adult Jack has a vision, we see the expansion of our sun into a Red Giant and the end of the Earth; thus, we see the physical answer to the where-are-we-going question. We see this even further defined in the last parts of Jack’s vision as he walks amongst the dead on a beach.

In the third part of the story, we are told the explanation to a topic first brought up by Mrs. O’Brien (Jessica Chastain) in the opening scenes of the movie: there are two paths in life for Man to follow, the path of grace or the path of nature. These paths of nature versus grace are first suggested in the second part of the movie, the part that illustrates the origin of life. We observe a dinosaur that “compassionately” does not kill a second dinosaur that is at the mercy of the first. Instead, it would seem this dinosaur chooses the path of grace. The metaphor is greatly expanded in the third part of the movie wherein the early life of Jack, his two brothers and his parents are depicted in Waco. That his mother is clearly the human icon for the path of Grace, while his father is the icon for the path of nature is made abundantly clear. Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) made a choice early in his life to turn away from music for engineering. He has not become successful in this field and as a result carries a heavy burden of shame. After having been a stern father to Jack and his brothers and having lost his engineering job, Mr. O’Brien questions his own worth to Jack; Jack (having chosen the same path in life) rushes to reassure his father. Mrs. O’Brien has in the meanwhile been shown to be a person captivated by the joy of life as it surrounds her, and specifically in the joy of her three children.

Besides the philosophical aspects of the story, Malick himself grew up in 1950’s Waco Texas. For those of us that also grew up in this era, it is entertaining to watch the third part of the movie for the little details of life in the 50’s: the physical details like the beaded belts worn by little boys, or the bigger picture such as the sense of safety that permits people to leave their front doors unlocked or their children to walk home alone from school. The family life of the O’Brien family struck me as one not too atypical for life in the 50’s and early 60’s. The father works during the day, the mother stays at home to wash, clean, and cook. The father is a stern disciplinarian that walks a fine line between loving his children and guiding his children; the mother is there to pick up the pieces when the father crosses too far over the line into discipline. The movie makes much of the father’s delicate dance between his two desires towards the children, while the mother universally keeps to her single –minded path of love, of grace.

The final part of the movie is surely a complicated part. We see the adult Jack dealing with the passing of his younger brother and also with the upbringing he had at the hands of his father. To be sure, Jack was raised by both of his parents, but as he states in the movie, he is just like his father; he has chosen the path of nature. On the anniversary of the passing of RL, the adult Jack (Sean Penn) is filled with remorse; remorse for the lost little brother that “trusted him” (even when he shouldn’t have), remorse over a sterile marriage, and remorse over an unhappy life; a life buried in the stainless steel and glass canyons of Dallas – very far from his bucolic childhood in Waco. With his little brother dead and seemingly his loving mother, too, Jack is searching again for the answer to the big question raised by this movie; that is the meaning of life. Fortunately for Jack, he has a vision of walking through a portal in the desert. He meets his mother and his little brother once again. He sees many people on a beach, apparently happy and satisfied. Jack returns from his vision with a smile on his face.

This movie is gorgeous in both visual and musical imagery. Apparently, Malik chose to minimize the use of CGI and to use older techniques in order to create his vision of the origin of the universe and life (presumably this did not extend to the various dinosaurs depicted). That Malik had a vision for this movie and that he exercised his considerable skills to bring it to life cannot be doubted by anyone that has seen this movie. The only failure in the story from my point of view is that the viewer can sense Malik’s desire to send a profound message of hope and joy found by one path through life versus the despair and self-doubt to be found by the other path. I believe I can see and understand his message, but I was strangely unmoved by it. At a time in my life where I can be brought to tears by animated movies such as “Up”, I was simply not feeling the emotion I am sure Malik himself felt in writing and directing this movie. In the final analysis though, and despite being a scientist that has also largely chosen the path of nature, I concede his point. The path chosen and symbolized by the mother figure, Mrs. O’Brien, and so beautifully shown in the scene of her smilingly holding a butterfly is surely a wonderful and happy path to take in life. Is it the only way to understand and be content with the universe is a question I am not certain is so clearly true. I believe there are several ways to shout with joy for the universe.