The Big Short

It seems like a low-blow to make a devastatingly satirical look at events so closely linked to the Global Financial Crisis when it’s effects are still being felt around the world, but Adam McKay (creator of Anchorman, Step Brothers and The Other Guys) strikes an empathetic balance with The Big Short. 

The year is 2005 and Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a mathematical genius and hedge-fund manager realises that the stability of the U.S housing market is being undermined by high-risk subprime loans. Burry predicts the market has approximately two years before a crash and decides to bet against the housing market with credit default swaps. Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) hears of this and decides to get in on the game and, thanks to a misdialed phone call, alerts another hedge-fund manager, Mark Baum (Steve Carell) to the scheme. A pair of young investors find a booklet of Vennetts and also hope to make some money out of default swaps, enlisting their friend and retired banker Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) to help complete the transaction. 

The most crucial part of The Big Short is its focus on two shades of immorality. It pits those that recognise and take advantage of the housing market’s impending doom against the bankers that arrogantly continue to saturate the housing bubble. It doesn’t make it difficult to take sides - the four leads do at least have some empathy for those that will be hit worst by it - but that’s not really the point. It serves as a darkly enjoyable indictment of the financial industry’s greedy tunnel-vision. McKay creates an interesting focus on detail where he breaks the fourth wall with celebrities such as Anthony Bourdain, Selena Gomez and Margot Robbie explaining - or more precisely, dumbing-down - the financial terms operating within the scenes. Personally, these snippets didn’t particularly help me understand everything at play, but rather served to relax me enough into the story that I was happy to let the jargon go over my head. Of course the experience will be different for different viewers but I feel this was at least partly McKay’s intention. Otherwise he would have used Margot Robbie with a play-school diorama, not Margot Robbie in a bathtub. 

The four leads divide the film into different stories that really only slightly interweave as news of the scheme spreads, and most of the performances are great. The only issue with the way they emerge are the short backstories. They feel tacked-on, at times unnecessary and more crucially, jarringly break the satirical tone. Steve Carell is more-believable in this role than he was in Foxcatcher, and that’s not just because he’s constantly angry or that the comedic material is more to his style but because in that film he was so out of his own skin that I found it impossible not to just see a heavily disguised Steve Carell, whereas here he really makes Mark Baum his own. The same can’t be said about Gosling’s Jared Vennett, whose charismatic veneer can’t outweigh his belligerent lack of empathy. 

Christian Bale’s mildly-autistic performance is book-ended by a drumming heavy-metal admiration and a mathematical temperament. Like most of the leads, he has a refreshing honesty about him - particularly when he discusses with his investors via emails - and thankfully Bale doesn’t lean as heavily on the ‘rain man’ act as I had expected. Brad Pitt’s character is probably the most interesting in the movie, with his unusually subdued performance he portrays a man that has conflicting moral predicaments which become much more evident when the crash occurs. The Big Short undoubtedly takes influence from The Wolf of Wall Street, particularly in its willingness to break the fourth wall, but also in its editing style. McKay is not as heavy on the montages as Scorsese but its sense of hyperactivity is the same. Which is not to say that this is on par with Wolf but it is able to keep an audience’s attention through similar techniques. 

The Big Short proves that McKay can commit to satire with a strong sense of purpose. It catches the apathy of high-finance whilst still hinting at the human-suffering the crash causes, bolstered by some great performances from the leads.You’ll be laughing all the way through and feeling guilty about doing it.