The Big Short (5/5 Stars)

This movie is an achievement on several fronts. First it achieves clarity in its subject. Second it achieves humor throughout. Third it has a strong moral. It takes considerable skill to do this given that the subject, the secondary mortgage market, is complicated and obscure and I can only hope my review is organized well enough to capture everything that needs to be praised.

The story comes from Michael Lewis’s nonfiction book, “The Big Short.” That book tells three completely separate stories about who profited from the subprime meltdown that cratered the global economy in 2008. Given that almost nobody figured out (or wanted to figure out) that everything was terrible before it was, the people that did are very interesting outsiders. The movie was adapted by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay. It was directed by Adam McKay.

One is Dr. Michael Burry (Christian Bale), an ex-brain surgeon hedge fund manager, who did something nobody else did. He read the underlying mortgage bonds. He spent a couple weeks doing so while barefoot in his office listening to deafness-inducing death metal. Then he did an extraordinarily audacious thing. In 2005, he invested 100 million dollars of his client’s money (against their wishes) in a financial instrument he requested the banks invent that bet against these bonds. It was a ballsy move given his own calculations had the bonds failing in the second quarter of 2007. How the movie treats this character is illuminating. They could have easily gone down the Benedict Cumberbatch route of making him arrogant and dismissive of all the ordinary people of the world. But as Michael Burry points out to his angry clients, “I don’t know how to be sarcastic. I can’t tell a joke. I know numbers.” He corresponds with the incredulous bankers he works with in a humble unassuming way. Everybody is either making fun of him or angry with him for the next couple years.

Second is Mark Baum (Steve Carell). We are introduced to him in an anger management support group. A troubled man is talking about how the world makes him angry. Mark Baum walks in late and immediately starts talking about himself. He is angry with Wall Street bankers and all the big guys beating up the small people. He casually pours himself a cup of coffee and sits down completely oblivious to the fact that he has interrupted the meeting. Then his phone rings. “I have to take this,” he remarks and leaves the room to take the call. Fucking Brilliant. The man is an asshole, but given that he hates Wall Street and spends the entire movie railing against corruption and fraud, he is our asshole. He has a team of angry people working for him including Danny Moses (Rafe Spall), Porter Collins (Hamish Linklater), and my favorite Vinnie Daniel (Jeremy Strong). This quartet form an angry hedge fund that is propositioned by an oily banker named Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling). Vennett has heard of Michael Burry’s bet and wants to sell somebody else the same thing. Unfortunately nobody wants in on this bet. Except the Baum hedge fund guys who don’t trust bankers. There is a lot of yelling amongst these guys, most of it hilarious. And that is a very important thing as what Vennett is explaining to Baum and (also to us) is the secondary mortgage market, which is an absurdly obfuscated and complicated thing. The movie pulls out all the stops and breaks a lot of rules in order to explain how it works. Jared Vennett, the chief explainer, also serves as the movie’s narrator. At other times people just turn to the camera and make it a little clearer to the audience what exactly is happening on the screen. Then at other other times the movie employs Margot Robbie in a bubble bath, Selena Gomez at a blackjack table, and Anthony Bourdain making a Monday morning stew of old fish to explain the different tranches of a Collateralized Debt Obligation. It also helps that McKay sometimes substitutes for different financial terms the word “dogshit,” as in “these loans are dogshit,” as opposed to “non-performing." All of this saves a lot of time, which as McKay should know and amply demonstrates is the friend of comedy.

Third is the twenty-something partnership of Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Witrock). They specialize in betting that bad things will happen (natural disasters and the like) given the theory that most people do not plan on terrible things to happen to them. They are introduced (about 45 minutes into the film) in a very endearing way. They want to go work for JP Morgan and have an interview that does not get past the lobby of the building. An intern (or at least a very young associate) meets them downstairs and points out that they have one billion (or something) less money than it takes to get an ISDA (described as the ticket to get to the big boys table). They feel stupid and rejected. So let us do a tally. We have our bullied nerd, our asshole, and our young nobody underdogs.

There is one more character but I’m going to intterupt my own review to talk about the ingenious way Adam McKay brings all of these characters together. They never meet each other, but they know about each other. Jared hears about Michael Burry’s bet at an afterwork bar. Charlie and Jamie pick up Jared’s prospectus in the lobby of JP Morgan. Except that is not how it happened. We see this happen but then Jared turns to the camera at the afterwork bar and tells us that he does not hang out with these people. He has fashion friends. Actually, Charlie tells us, he did not pick up the prospectus in the lobby. He heard it through a friend and Jamie found out about some other not very cinematic way. This is halfway brilliant by Adam McKay. First, how these characters hear about the other deals is not important to the story. In many nonfiction adaptations moviemakers do this sort of efficient blurring of the truth all the time. It saves time for the audience, this is understood, so it does not take away from anything for the characters to turn to us and let us know that we are seeing a movie convention. But only that would not be brilliant. It is brilliant because McKay takes this convention and admission and turns it into a setup for one of the greatest, hilarious, and cathartic payoffs in the movie. During a seminar Mark Baum interrupts a speaker on a stage (not during a Q and A session) with a question. The speaker answers and Mark interrupts him again to contradict him angrily. Then Mark’s phone rings, he answers it, announces to everyone that he has to take this and leaves the room. Then Jared, who is also in the room, turns to the camera and states, “That actually happened. Mark did that.” This joke would not have been possible if McKay had not been breaking the rules all the while. He needed to break the rules in order to tell the story efficiently. What makes this movie’s screenplay brilliant is how he uses all the broken rules (that are rules generally because they are distracting and take the audience out of the story) to do things that bring home jokes and cathartic points. The techniques that break the rules do not distract, they reinforce and make scenes better. Adam McKay and Charles Randolph deserve the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

So Charlie and Jamie are rejected but they have a trick card. They have befriended an ex-banker in their hometown named Ben Rickart (Brad Pitt with a beartd). Underscoring how bullshit the system is, this guy uses his connections with a big bank to get the necessary ISDA that they would not have been able to get based on their underlying merit.

So now everything is set up and explained and the rest of the movie is payoff. It is generally funny up until a point and then the movie hits us with several very moral scenes. My favorite (and there are plenty to pick from) comes at a point where Charlie and Jamie make several great bets and are very excited about it. They are dancing in the lobby of a Las Vegas convention center and Ben Rickart angrily tells them to stop. “Do you realize what you just did? You bet against the U.S. economy. If it turns out well for you it hurts everybody else. One tick upward in the unemployment rate is a hundred thousand people out of work. This is what I hate about banking. It takes human beings and turns them into numbers in a spreadsheet. Just don’t fucking dance.”

There are several moments like this in the movie and they all work very well. It may come as some surprise that this is the first dramatic movie Adam McKay has ever made. He is known for the best of the Will Ferrell comedies (Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step-Brothers, and The Other Guys). It is fun now to watch other movie critic revise what they think of the guy now that he has made a truly great movie that is not a comedy. (Not me. I have always thought Talladega Nights was a perfect movie). I hope McKay makes other movies that are not completely comedies. He obviously cares deeply about people and has the skill and talent to take complicated problems and break them down in digestible parts. He also has a comedic director's skill in caricature. This comes into play most readily in his satirical treatment of secondary characters. I especially love how the woman at the ratings agency (a fine Melissa Leo) has come back from an eye exam and is wearing thick sunglasses. And the coup de grace has to be the SEC girl who is in Vegas at the secondary mortgage market convention with the sole purpose of shacking up with a guy with Goldman Sachs in order to get on the ground floor of that bank once her couple years at the agency are up.

I have studied this subject quite a bit and have only this to add. Everything this movie shows about the banking industry is correct and their angry attitude is entirely called for. Having said that, it does not follow that the homeowners (who this movie does not hold under their satirical light) are entirely blameless. Many took out loans for houses they could not afford. Some people took out two or three mortgages and a line of credit on their property. These people deserved to lose their homes. I bring this up not to contradict this movie but to impress upon the reader that one does not need to take sides between ordinary people and banks in this crisis. It is entirely possible and I would posit that it is completely true that everybody is guilty and the true injustice is not that ordinary people suffered but that the big banks and the people who worked for them did not. Of course if one had to decide who is guiltier, it would tip towards the banks. After all, they were professionals who told everyone that they knew what they were doing.

One of my favorite scenes is when Charlie and Jamie sneak into Lehman Brothers after it has collapsed. And they walk around the deserted trading floor with its infantile Red Bull can pyramids. It was not how Charlie imagined it would be. “What did you expect?” asks Jamie. Charlie reflects a moment before adding, “I thought adults worked here.”