The Big Short
The past year in the filmography of Adam McKay has almost entirely upended my thinking about him as a filmmaker. Up until now, I knew him best for his collaborations with Will Ferrell, whether it was “Anchorman” and “Step Brothers” (which others like, but I don’t) or “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby” or “The Other Guys” (which I very much enjoyed), with his script for the very funny 2012 political comedy “The Campaign” (still very much in their traditional wheelhouse) thrown in for good measure. In 2015, though, he helped rewrite the script for Marvel’s “Ant-Man” with buddy Paul Rudd, and this Christmas, co-wrote and directed a movie about the beginnings of the 2008 financial crisis based on a book from the author of The Blind Side and Moneyball that is getting end-of-year love that feels alien to McKay’s previous work. I’m not quite sure what to think anymore about the filmmaker, but when it comes to “The Big Short,” it’s much easier to pinpoint my feelings about the tale he weaves with co-screenwriter Charles Randolph (“Love & Other Drugs”). We’ll get to that later, though.
The film starts with neurologist-turned-hedge fund manager Dr. Michael Burry (Christian Bale) finding what seems to be an anomaly in the housing market: in the second quarter of 2007, the housing market will collapse due to the mass default of several bad mortgages that have been bundled together. He finds this in 2005. The moneymen who invested with him don’t believe it for a second, believe the holy word of Alan Greenspan, and trusting in the housing market’s place as the most stable part of the economy. Burry knows what he’s seeing, though, and he sees an opportunity to hit it big by betting against the market. When he takes his ideas to Wall Street, though, they dismiss him as insane, but are more than happy to take his money. Soon, he has exposure to the market to the tune of 1.3 billion, which has his investors up in arms, but it’s not long before other hedge funds are seeing the same thing, and the same potential to bet against the banks for big money, including Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), who narrates our film, and Mark Baum (Steve Carell), whose crew specializes in seeing the bullshit behind Wall Street’s greed. Suddenly, Credit Default Swaps are big business for hedge funds, but the longer it takes for the market to implode, the tougher it is for others to see what’s going on. And then, in 2007, the shit will hit the fan, and it goes downhill from there.
Like Jay Roach, who directed McKay’s “Campaign” script and has become a formidable political voice after the acclaim of “Recount,” “Game Change” and this year’s “Trumbo,” McKay is making quite a leap from silly comedy director to an acute chronicler of political and true-to-life absurdities with “The Big Short,” and it doesn’t feel as far out of left field as it may seem. If we didn’t have the knowledge we now have of how the housing collapse happened from not just Michael Lewis’s book, but also the reporters who have gone after the story in the aftermath of the disaster, you’d be hard-pressed to see much difference between Burry, Baum, Vennett and the outrageous personalities and events of this film and the craziness in something like “Anchorman” and “The Other Guys.” Don’t expect a laugh riot that’ll make your sides hurt, though, because the laughs in “The Big Short” will be sticking in your throat instead. If you catch yourself thinking of Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” at times throughout the film, I wouldn’t blame you, because this is very much a similar story about the same type of shady shit that film captured so insanely. The difference with “The Big Short,” however, is that this film isn’t told from the perspective of a wolf but from the people who discover it in sheep’s clothing. It would be wrong to paint Burry and Baum and Vennett and others in this film (like the small-time fund run by Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock)) as completely “good guys,” though; as Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) tells Geller and Shipley in stark terms after they bet big against the market, they are taking a bet against the American people. Homes will be lost. Jobs will be lost. Lives will be lost. Baum and his team are the closest thing to real good guys in the film, since they pride themselves on sniffing out bullshit like this, but the look on Mark’s face when he realizes that they will be no better than the bankers about to get bailed out after things really take a dive in September 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers when they sell their interest says it all- they are every bit as complicit in this fraud as the people who perpetrated it. Carell is terrific in a role that feels very much at home with his movie career thus far, whether you’re talking about “Anchorman” or “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” or “Little Miss Sunshine” or his Oscar-nominated turn in “Foxcatcher” last year; Baum gives him some of his best material to date, and he has moments that will make you wonder if you can ever truly imagine him as a comedic funnyman again. Carell isn’t the only acting highpoint of this film, though; Pitt has a lot to dig into with a brief role, Gosling is wickedly seductive despite having the worst head of hair he’s ever had in a movie, and Marisa Tomei has some choice moments as Baum’s distant wife. The MVP of the film, though, is Bale. Burry has a glass eye, is a very private person, and listens to hard rock with intensity, but he’s a brilliant numbers man, and we immediately trust him when he realizes what is about to go down, and not just because we know what did go down. We also follow him as he tries to hold on to his investors, who are quite skeptical of what he’s up to, and what he claims he has found. This is one of Bale’s very best performances, and it is both of a piece with his intense work in films like “Rescue Dawn,” “The Prestige” and “The Fighter,” but also quite funny in the way he embodies Burry’s peculiar mannerisms. That’s the type of inspired work McKay can get out of people- even cameos by Selena Gomez, Anthony Bourdain and Margot Robbie (who’s naked in a bubble bath) as they explain the inner workings of how CDOs and sub-prime mortgages work feel like revelatory moments for the people in question- and it makes “The Big Short” more entertaining than it should be given the tragedy it exposes in dirty detail.
