Awards season is a time for some movies to be Enronised. Reputations get inflated. And Adam McKay’s The Big Short is overvalued stock.
As if assembled at some gigantic dinner party, saucer-eyed pundits have been excitably talking this up, and the prospectus did look inviting. With co-screenwriter Charles Randolph, McKay has adapted the non-fiction bestseller by Michael Lewis about those various financial mavericks, Rain Men and chancers who “shorted” the market before the great crash of 2008 – that is, they bet that subprime mortgage bonds would collapse and take the economy with them. Lewis also wrote Moneyball, filmed by Bennett Miller, about stat wizardry and baseball, another book about nerd visionaries seeing things hidden from the rest of us at a deep molecular level.
I came to The Big Short in a state of anticipation, only to be baffled at how smug, laborious and self-important it is, trying to combine Gordon Gekko sexiness with anti-banker correctness, like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street rewritten by Malcolm Gladwell and Justin Welby. It’s a film that doesn’t let you have your cake, or eat it. And how agonisingly it keeps stopping to explain technical stuff by bringing on celeb guest stars such as superchef Anthony Bourdain or singer Selena Gomez to recite the patronising and gimmicky mini-explanations written for them. (To explain how high-risk subprime mortgage products were invisibly and dangerously “bundled in” with relatively decent loans, Bourdain says it was like some chefs’ cheeky habit of chucking old fish cuts in with nicer fish to make a stew. But wait. Does that mean the stew is going to poison us?)
The Big Short is fatally unsure about whether it is a righteous condemnation of fraud, or a black comic romp with cool amoral dudes and rebellious outsiders. There is neither the gleeful energy of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street nor the plain informative clarity of Charles Ferguson’s documentary Inside Job. At one stage, investment brokers cheerfully explain their subprime scam and someone asks how it is they can confess so easily. “They’re not confessing – they’re bragging!” comes the reply. There’s a similar tonal problem here.
Christian Bale gives a good performance as Michael Burry, a shy and difficult man employed as a fund manager. He sees that subprimes are about to blow and persuades his boss to gamble the firm’s entire capital on financial instruments that will pay off when the market collapses. Ryan Gosling is Jared Vennett, a tough-talking blowhard who gets wind of the deal, grasps the thinking behind it and persuades an investment team to get in on this opportunity – led by Mark Baum, played by Steve Carell, an angry, overheated guy, traumatised by a family tragedy he won’t discuss, and driven by a need to punish the financial world’s iniquities. Meanwhile Brad Pitt plays Ben Rickert, a broker who has retired from the financial world in disgust, but now helps two newbies to join in this same retributive adventure.
It sounds like a fascinating story: taken together, these disparate people could almost be akin to Ocean’s Eleven or The Dirty Dozen or Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. In a more cheerfully cynical or ironic mood – the sort of mood that helped create Adam McKay’s successful comedies – The Big Short might have been a sort of heist film. But disapproval and piety preclude this approach: and Pitt gives the two younger colleagues a pompous and redundant lecture on how they mustn’t gloat, because the crash they’re exploiting will ruin lives.
Carell himself gives a dull, one-note performance: permanently pissed off, permanently outraged by the rottenness of everything he discovers about the subprime racket, but in a strange, impotent, not-funny way. He can’t stop what’s happening; he can’t take pleasure in cashing in on its downfall, and even the cashing in part turns out to be frustratingly difficult. His character is, incidentally, involved in one of the most outrageous examples of “sexposition” I have ever seen: the practice of getting characters to explain things in a lapdancing club in order to spice up the dialogue. Mark Baum gets a stripper to explain how her dodgy mortgage works, while she’s at work.
Most exasperatingly, the film appears finally to shrug at the outcome of all this, in a kind of whaddaya-gonna-do grimace, and all those homeless subprime victims are far less important dramatically than sensitive vindicated genius Christian Bale, with the adorable wife he met on match.com. Some people made money; more people lost money (but no one we care about). The end result is a kind of exhausted acquiescence. I wanted a real attack. This comes up short.
