A Hilarious, Appalling Look At Finance

This film, “The Big Short,” is a comedy that masks a growing anger, one you may share. Director Adam McKay has transformed Michael Lewis's bestseller, a dense book about the 2008 economic collapse and the people who profited from it, into a fast-paced film like his movies with Will Ferrell. 

If you understand complex financial instruments, or believe government policies precipitated the disaster, you may not enjoy the movie. But if, like most of us, you don't know your collateralized debt obligations (C.D.O.) from your credit-default swaps, you'll bounce along with this boisterous film and laugh out loud, even as you should grow angrier by the minute.

Ten years ago, few outside the big bank fortresses understood what was going on inside: mind-boggling chicanery based on mortgage debt instruments that combined good mortgages with poor, even outright worthless ones, sold as investment packages. Understand? Not to worry. Margot Robbie, from “The Wolf of Wall Street,” in a bubble bath with a glass of champagne explains subprime mortgages for us, then waves us away with a four-letter word.

Then there is celebrity chef/writer Anthony Bourdain using a three-day-old fish soup as a metaphor for a financial deal. And perhaps best, Selena Gomez at a blackjack table showing how a synthetic C.D.O. works. So is McKay aiming to educate us? Absolutely not. He is, however, out to play with the chaos surrounding the buildup to the financial crisis. He spins various story lines like a boy playing with a top, and the film moves are so fast-paced, so boisterous, so exuberant in exposing gullibility and greed that you laugh at the farce while anticipating the disaster to come.

The film centers around Michael Burry (Christian Bale, edgy, terrific) whose medical education allows him to be called Dr. Burry. But he is no longer in a caring, healing profession: he runs Scion Capital, an investment fund. Smart, socially inept, devoted to new age living — Burry walks barefoot around his office with drums and loud music — he detects through laborious reviews of data that the housing market is built on mortgage quicksand and will soon sink. 

So Burry decides to bet against the market — it's legal, if not moral, to make money off the suffering of others — and soon has intrigued Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling, playing a lounge lizard who happens to grift on Wall Street) and Mark Baum (Steve Carell in one of his best serious performances) into placing the same bets. As the film gallops toward the ultimate calamity, we join the main characters in wondering why the collapse is taking so long. 

It would spoil the fun and the underlying anger of the film to reveal more of the multiple story lines. Suffice that the breakneck humor, the large and superb cast, the consummate brio of the film leave us rooting for Burry and Baum and even slimy Vennett, only recovering our anger when McKay slams us with some preachy editorializing in onscreen print at the end. But then during the holidays I heard a Wall Street type explain that the whole housing bubble was the creation of the federal government and President Clinton's edict to expand American home ownership, which caused the banks to give loans to unqualified people. So I'll just be angry along with McKay.

“The Big Short” is playing in area theaters. It is rated R.

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