Fueled by impotent, blustery outrage, Adam McKay's The Big Short, about the grotesque banking and investing practices that led to the 2008 financial collapse, is about as fun and enlightening as a cranked-up portfolio manager's rue-filled
One of McKay's funny pictures, The Other Guys (2010), ended, somewhat incongruously, with a welter of graphs and charts about CEO billions and bank bailouts and other figures from the ledger of turbo-capitalism. Rather than stoke fury, though, that data dump had the
The Big Short queasily valorizes some who profited from the global freakout.
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Or, more precisely, as "outsiders and weirdos [who] saw what no one else could... the giant lie at the heart of the economy," in the words of oily Wall Street banker Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), who also serves as the film's narrator. Sporting a Chia Pet perm and a vaguely outer-borough-sounding accent, Gosling is the first in the cast to directly address the audience, a device deployed to diminishing return. The eccentrics extolled in the opening scene include Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a Northern California — based MD and money manager who
These financiers all gather at the American Securitization Forum in Las Vegas, save for Burry, who is mostly shown in his grim San Jose office, scribbling on a whiteboard, or wailing on his drum kit in his basement (like the love the physician/rapacious capitalist has for cheap haircuts, cargo shorts, and going barefoot, his enthusiasm for heavy metal is treated as further proof of his ennobling nonconformity). There, as Jared tells Mark and his lieutenants, they can see "how dumb this money really is." The cash may be stupid, and stupidly abundant, but the financial agreements that make it so are impossibly abstruse: "Who understands this stuff?" Jamie frets to Charlie.
McKay, who co-wrote The Big Short's script with Charles Randolph, decides that the best way to explain the deliberately obfuscating terminology is to add another distracting element to the film: cutting away to cameoing notables, of varying degrees of star wattage, who try to simplify the jargon, as Anthony Bourdain does with "collateralized debt obligation." The glib strategy further clutters a movie already too busy with characters looking right at us to offer asides and with vapid intertitles. (In addition to the Twain adage, The Big Short includes this profundity: "Truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry," a maxim "overheard at a Washington, D.C. bar.")
The first celebrity to offer one of these mini
The Big Short
Starring Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, Marisa Tomei, Adepero Oduye, Karen Gillan, Melissa Leo, Margot Robbie, and Anthony Bourdain. Directed by Adam McKay. Written by Adam McKay and Charles Randolph. Based on the book by Michael Lewis.