The genius of The Big Short lies in the way that it laughs in the face of horror. Its depth of indignation is tucked underneath a blanket of winks and nods, of outlandish set pieces and witty celebrity cameos. Marking a significant change of pace for director Adam McKay (Step Brothers), the film holds a prodigious entertainment value, but as a means rather than an end. It seeks to disturb, to string you along until its reality is all-too-clear – until you’re in too deep to look away. The Big Short moves fast, boasting good humor and excellent performances as it sifts through plot turns and location (and credit) swaps. By the end, it dazzles, brilliantly demonstrating its importance without an ounce of self-satisfaction.
McKay fashions this adaptation of Michael Lewis’ eponymous exposé as a crash-course on the ‘07-08 financial crisis. He has Ryan Gosling, in character as Deutsche Bank trader Jared Vennett, address the audience with definitions and explanations, describing what led to the collapse, who was responsible for it and why no one seemed to notice what was long coming. Despite fears to the contrary, the device is neither didactic nor gimmicky, but necessary – the film’s content is thick with Wall Street jargon and elaborate financial schemes. And there’s something rather disarming about it as The Big Short rolls on. The mechanics of the crisis are conveyed with comic simplicity, but as the degree of deception and corruption involved comes into clearer focus, such a stylized presentation makes for a mortifying, albeit effective, juxtaposition.
The film begins in the early 2000s, and its focus shifts between the small hedge fund management firm of the outspoken Mark Baum (Steve Carell); the travails of a pair of young, aspiring Wall Street power players (played by John Magaro and Finn Wittrock); and the action at Scion Capital, the company where the eccentric Dr. Michael Burry (Christian Bale) first uncovers the impending housing bubble-burst. Common to all three is the “big short”: the decision to bet against the housing market even though it’s looking rock-solid, and to the dismay of their associates and colleagues. Again, initially, these narrative strands are played broadly – for laughs. The big banks mock those betting against them, eagerly snatching their bets with fog in their lenses; outside characters call the shorters crazy. It’s amusing and knowing, with the audience and to some extent the protagonists – when they break the fourth wall – very much aware of who’s right and who’s wrong. And then, it’s sort of terrifying: the denial and the fraud goes so deep that it’s only at the last possible moment that our heroes are vindicated. By then, the taste of a big payout goes sour, anyway.
The Big Short is mindfully erratic, zany and quick and yet incredibly detailed. McKay’s camera scales Manhattan buildings. He cuts between the action and snippets of commercials and television programs and printed advertisements, often cuing these back-and-forths with a Top-40 music hit. Through the caper-esque structure and flair for the unconventional, he captures a moment: a cultural moment, a national moment, and eventually, a global moment. The film is overwhelmingly white and male, from the heroes to the villains, but it shows deep awareness in that regard – as Baum later muses, the true victims of the story are those who can’t fit into the movie’s boundaries, the families and lower-level employees kicked out of their homes and booted from their jobs. McKay doesn’t revel in the despair, as Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes so powerfully did earlier this year. He grins at it, instead – he exposes the extent of fraud for which its perpetrators went unpunished, laughing with Baum and Vennett and all the rest at the absurdity of such blatant, unchecked corruption. At least a few guys were smart enough to benefit from it.
Only, McKay is hardly content with such a message. The laughing stops. Meet-and-greets with clueless lenders and secretive bankers begin to invoke a sense of dread, a queasy reminder of the stakes being all but toyed with. In a key scene, a Standard and Poor's representative (played with slimy intensity by Melissa Leo) points out Baum’s hypocrisy for banking on the national economy to fail – her accusation provokes, and the narrative effect is cathartic. The Big Short gradually removes its hyperactive shell, as it ruminates on the gravity of its characters’ discovery. The film’s bottled-up anger explodes, with shards left in every corner of the action. And it’ll make your blood boil, too – with exceptional force, McKay reveals his intent and his perspective, coming to grand and earned conclusions after the careful effort of laying out the crisis’ specifics. There’s no genre to place the film in, really – it’s a farce built out of reflection and rage, an unnerving docudrama dressed in relentless mockery. Either way, it’s fearlessly fun, a bold and personal condemnation of capitalism gone awry.
The film, loose and overstuffed as it may be, benefits from a tremendous cast. Steve Carell continues to redefine himself post-Office, following up his expertly-chilly Foxcatcher turn with a passionate, endearing performance. As Baum, a money-man marked by tragedy and conscience, the actor anchors the film, showcasing his comedic chops as well as his emotional depth. He’s surrounded by great character actors including Rafe Spall and Hamish Linklater as his henchmen, and eventually, he crosses paths with Gosling, making for a sublime mixture of dorky and suave. At the other end of the film, Bale – who’s typically excellent – pops in and out, and Wittrock and Magaro more than hold their own as the babies of the cast. Each actor is as adept comically as he is dramatically, a crucial component to McKay’s vision. Indeed, Carell effortlessly careens between the outrageous and the melancholy, right until a killer of a line to end the film.
The Big Short is catching an end-of-year wave movie that consists mostly of slower, meditative fare – Spotlight, Carol, Anomalisa and a whole lot else. McKay’s methods are less formally exacting – less “serious” – but they’re no less profound or resonant. This is a doozy of a film, urgent and boisterously vital – it plays like a drunken spiral into self-realization, getting at our values before unveiling the rot at their core. It humors, then aggravates and finally blisters, leaving its audience in a state of nauseous fury. For this subject, there might not be a more appropriate feeling to come away with. Disturbing, excessive and beholden to no rules, The Big Short is the definitive representation of our time’s greatest institutional failure.
Grade: A