The Big Short movie review & film summary (2015) | Roger Ebert (2024)

The pre-release buzz is true: This is not your father’sfinancial crisis movie. Nor, for that matter, is it “The Wolf of Wall Street.”The money masters of the universe depicted in this film—and while their storiesare interconnected, their lives are not, necessarily—barely drink a sufficientamount of red wine to get a good buzz on. Their buzz derives from an enhancedsense of smell. The closest to a “Wolf”-like character here is Ryan Gosling’sJared Vennett, the most standard-issue suit-and-tie banking bro of the bunch,and part of his schtick is to stand in a conference room sniffingostentatiously because, yes, he smells money.

The money smelt, and earned, by the adventurers of thisstory of the real-life 2008 world economic meltdown is arguably tainted by badkarma. Based on a book by Michael Lewis, “The Big Short” is about how severaltraders and hedge fund managers made fortunes because they saw that the housingmarket’s decline would cause a collapse of bonds contrived from sub-primemortgages. The terminology is both dry and dizzying, the machinationsincredibly convoluted. The main thesis of the story, adapted for the screen bydirector Adam McKay and his co-screenwriter Charles Randolph, is that asbanking became the top industry of the United States, bankers deliberatelyconcocted Byzantine financial tools whose main function was to help the richget richer and screw over the little guy. You can expect a lot of pushbackagainst this film of the “where do these affluent Hollywood types get offcriticizing income inequality” but that won’t mean the movie is wrong.

And it really is quite a movie: entertaining and engaging,but also mortifying; a good alternate title might be “American Horror Story.” The film intertwinesthree discrete storylines. The first focuses on Christian Bale’s Michael Burry,a trained physician with very stunted social skills whose genius at analysisand numbers-crunching found him running a very successful West Coast hedgefund. After finding some terrifying data within the structures of a largenumber of mortgage bonds, he concocts a radical idea: to “short,” that is, bet against,the housing bond market, which the banks have puffed up as being unassailable.To do this he has to convince those banks to create a new financial tool, akind of bond insurance policy. If Burry’s right and the market collapses, heand his hedge fund make stupid money. But for as long as the market staysstable, Burry and his fund are obliged to pay stupid money in premiums.

McKay is best known as the director of such comedic fare as“Anchorman,” and, for all the silly self-reflexive humor in those films, there’sa sly underlying intelligence animating them, and here that takes the form ofcelebrity cameos wherein attractive people such as Margot Robbie and SelenaGomez directly address the audience with cogent and colorful explanations ofterms such as “sub-prime.” He also enlists “Anchorman” rep company member SteveCarell for one main role, as financial Prophet of Doom Mark Baum, whose ownfund gets a whiff of what Gosling’s character is smelling and takes a piece ofthe action, in a partial fit of “screw the system” indignation. Carell’sself-torturing character is likely the closest thing this movie has to adirectorial surrogate. Finn Wittrock and John Magaro play a couple of JimHenson’s Hedge Fund Babies, mentored by Brad Pitt’s Ben Rickert. Rickert’scharacter can be read as something of a slight sendup of Pitt’s own currentdo-gooder persona; he’s a former master trader who left the game out ofdisgust, and who preaches a hippie-ish quasi-survivalist gospel to his twoyoung acolytes even as he helps them get pretty much super-rich.

I started off feeling skeptical about this movie: thehairstyles and clothes of the main characters were more ‘90s music-video thanearly 2000s, and the sometimes-color-desaturated flashbacks to some characters’back stories were a little on the drearily commonplace side. But the narrativemomentum, combined with the profane wit of much of the dialogue, and thecommitted acting going on beneath the hairpieces, all did their job. And theygot across the angry, pessimistic conviction behind the movie, which is thatthe major banks all engaged in fraudulent, criminal activity, and that the U.S.government bailed them out at the expense of the little guy, and that there’sno indication that the banks aren’t going to do something like the exact samething all over again. You are free to disagree. But this is a movie that usesboth cinema art and irrefutable facts to make its case. It’s strong stuff.