Like all superb art about significant political events, The Big Short holds a mirror to human beings caught up in forces beyond their control. Highly entertaining and often comical, the film focuses on several maverick financial rocket scientists who go against the grain, trying to take the upper hand in the way they know best. Betting that the economy will collapse long before the rest of their contemporaries catch on, the geniuses here may be wacko eccentric in completely different ways, but they know how to make money.
Michael Burry (Christian Bale), the most extreme of the bunch, appears to be rather far along the Asperger spectrum. He’s also in charge of investments for a California investment firm. He often works barefoot listening to death metal, and doesn’t pay much attention to his staff. His initial investigation of the mortgage housing bubble convinces him he must bet against what had been assumed to be a rock solid bonds contrived from subprime mortgages. The idea was so foreign at the time that Burry must go to the investment banks and ask them to create a new financial entity–in essence, bond insurance.
When Mark Baum (Steve Carell playing a fictional character based on Steve Eisman) and his testosterone team at a hedge fund associated with Merrill Lynch catch on to Burry’s actions, they are persuaded to follow suit and make a big bet of their own. They are spurred by a hyperactive Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling, based on Gregg Lippmann) who himself works at Deutsche Bank and sells them the bets. Before buying, Baum’s group runs to Florida to survey the housing market close up. Mortgages there are falling off trees with brokers bragging to Baum that they do little vetting of clients. At first Baum thinks they are “confessing” when in actuality, as one of his underlings glumly informs him, they are “bragging.”
The Big Short, directed by Adam McKay (Anchorman, Talladega Nights) from the bestseller by Michael Lewis, follows Burry, Baum, Vennett and a couple of “garage hedge fund” out-of-town kids with much bemusement. The intense Baum rages against the deception and imprudence of the system and seems to hate himself for making the bet but can’t back off. He brings some conscience to the film (as does Brad Pitt as a retired-in-disgust-with-the-system trader who agrees to help the two upstarts) but it brazenly keeps an ironically gleeful tone. Celebrities (Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, Anthony Bourdain, Selma Gomez) play themselves and break the fourth wall as they intersperse the narrative with cheerful explanatory asides about credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations (CDO’s) and other Wall Street mumbo jumbo. They are terms that the big cats fired up at least in part as a smoke screen for their riverboat gambling with money from unsuspected Americans’ savings and trust funds.
You won’t recognize Melissa Leo as a beleaguered Standard & Poor analyst who makes no apologies for the rating agency’s own lack of moral fiber. She joins a cast where the performances are uniformly excellent, with Carell and Bale especially noteworthy. It’s no easy chore to portray the movie’s heroes in a manner to win over the viewer with their sheer outsider moxie. After all, morally they are no better than the corrupt system they bet against. The financial crisis of 2008 cost the American public $5 trillion. Although each of these guys made a personal fortune betting that the economy would essentially collapse, their actions pale against the bigger picture of a financial system gone berserk (and, due to regulatory inaction, one poised to allow another crisis to happen again).
Greed Turns Itself Upside Down: A Wry, Sobering Look at Wall Street’s Near-Armageddon
4.5 stars (out of 5)