What Brett Watched

The Big Short (2015)

To drown in cliche’s and paraphrase Gordon Gecko, ‘Greed is good,” though Adam Mckay would have us believe that greed is indeed good, as long as the greedy feel bad about doing greedy things. The BIg Short, Directed by Adam Mckay and adapted by Mckay and Charles Randolph from Michael Lewis’ book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, is well oiled machine of a film that is effective at making the dense narrative relatable, albeit from a condescending, and often times insulting parapet.

The film is built around it star-studded cast, which works as a circulatory system for a plot that will confuse the average person, this reviewer included. The tangled web starts with Christian Bale’s MIchael Burry, a hedge fund manager who first realizes that the US housing market, based on high-risk subprime loans, is unstable and likely to crash. Burry invests over a billion in his investor’s money to bet against the housing market, which infuriates his investors, obliges the big banks, and attracts the attention of Ryan Gosling’s Jared Vennet, a trader from Deutsche Bank, who decides to sell Burry’s credit defaults for his own profit. A mistaken phone call alerts Steve Carrell’s Mark Baum to the scheme, and Baum, a hedge fund manager disillusioned with the Wall Street big banks, and his team, hop on board. Finally, we have John Magaro’s Charlie Geller and Finn Wittrock’s Jamie Shipley, two young investors who by chance discover Vennett’s prospectus on the scheme and join the party. Are you getting all this? Need a break? Throw Brad Pitt, whose Plan B Entertainment produced the film, into the mix as Ben Rickert, a retired former trader who helps Geller and Shipley navigate Wall Street, and you have most of Hollywood represented in this film telling us about greed. Can you smell the irony yet?

Mckay’s characters, while wholly motivated by the all-mighty dollar, want to have have their cake and eat it too, as does the film in general. Burry understands the moral ambiguity of what he’s doing, but is driven by some primal nature to proceed, precisely because he can. The eccentric, metal-fueled Burry is initially motivated by opportunity; he can’t help but act on what he’s discovered, and Mckay often juxtaposes images of American pop/consumer culture with Burry making deals with the big boys of banking, thanks to crisp editing by Hank Corwin, to comment on the chasm between those in the banking world, and the wholly ignorant common people they prey upon. We get a sense that Burry is, or at least, becomes uncomfortable with profiting off of predatory lending, but follows through regardless in his quest to make the rich even richer, himself included; a building theme in the film. Bale does a terrific job here capturing the all-out weirdness of Burry, a flawed genius who is driven close to obsession to prove to himself, and everyone else, that he is right. Bale loses himself in the role; a modest caricature of entrepreneurship while simultaneously a toxic force of nature.

Baum and his team Frontpoint Partners, are used to send a similar message, although much less subtle. Mckay stresses Baum’s disdain for the ethics of Wall Street, and the character is poorly positioned as a moral pillar. Carrell gives the character all he has, and his efforts are impressive at times, but the character goes through a revelation process bordering on aloofness, and often ridiculousness. In Vegas, Baum dines with a CDO specialist (Byron Mann) and has an epiphany that predatory lending is wrong, as if he hasn’t been profiting off others his whole life. In another scene, Baum and his team learn from strippers about the housing bubble, because obviously strippers know best, and this requires Baum to not only go to a strip club, but actually receive a lap dance while learning this information. Mckay emphasizes repeatedly that Baum’s brother committed suicide in some attempt to garner our sympathy, yet this tragedy does little to effect the outcome; Baum still profits wildly from the housing crash, no matter how bad he feels about it.

In contrast to Baum is Jared Vennet, who Gosling tries to turn into a comedic springboard, but there’s not much here for Gosling to sink his teeth into. Vennet doesn’t have much room to grow as a character, ans as the film’s narrator, is used primarily to inject some machismo into the film and let us know that Wall Street is where the big boys play. Charlie Geller and Jamie Shipley cater to the same dilemma as Baum and his team, in that the during their quest to infiltrate Wall Street, they are used as a spotlight exposing the system’s fraud, yet still have no issue profiting. The duo is used frequently to remind us how confusing and opaque the financial world is, even though they are also portrayed as sharp self-starters.

Most of the film is, in fact, exposition, and with good reason. As Vennett tells us, “Wall Street loves to use confusing terms to make you think only they can do what they do.” It’s difficult stuff to understand for the uninitiated, and Mckay pulls out all the stops, including celebrity cameos, to explain the concepts. None of it works particularly well. Maybe using vapid celebrities to talk down to the audience seemed like a good idea to Mckay, but it only serves to interrupt the flow of the narrative. It was pure torture watching Selena Gomez read lines to us explaining synthetic CDO’s, and using Jenga is only slightly better. This exposition device comes off as smug and patronizing; almost like the film hates it’s audience. And maybe that’s the point. The film is yelling at us to care about this stuff, yet most people, then and now, are either willfully ignorant or just apathetic to this event. We’re distracted by pop culture, just as the the film distracts us with a starry cast and celebrity cameos; a dreary outlook for our future.

The BIg Short effectively and efficiently tells us about what happened behind the scenes leading up to the housing market crash in 2007-8, and it’s cast gives us a mostly inspired effort, however, the moral arcs of the characters fall flat and the expository methods miss the target. Mckay, in his most mature film to date, does succeed in telling us this dense story and that alone is admirable enough. 7/10.