The Big Short

The Big Short is a satirical docudrama that follows the handful of people who anticipated the 2008 financial crisis and bet (against all common wisdom) that the American housing and credit market would fail. Adam McKay (known mainly for co-writing and directing the broad Will Ferrell comedies Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, and The Other Guys) and Charles Randolph (writer of the disappointing pictures The Life of David Gale, The Interpreter, and Love & Other Drugs) seem an unlikely team to adapt Michael Lewis’ 2010 bestseller.  Lewis’ book explained, in ways most everyone could understand, how the Credit Default Swap was created, how a small handful of men used this financial tool to short (or bet against) AAA rated mortgage-backed-securities, and how these guys anticipated, and were almost destroyed by, America’s massive housing bubble. Lewis also explored the greed, stupidity, and outright fraud that took place on Wall Street, at banks of all sizes, and in government agencies tasked with regulating an industry they were too deeply dependent on.  

Surprisingly, the screenplay is almost as well-structured, informative, and entertaining an adaptation of a complex work of non-fiction as Nicholas Pileggi’s and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. McKay and Randolph focus on just the right number of characters and find inventive ways to keep the movie light, funny, and easy to understand; yet their approach almost never devolves into shtick or patronizingly juvenile spoon-feeding of information. Unlike most documentaries about the causes of the global 2008 recession, The Big Short doesn’t work backwards, investigating abstract causes and effects. Instead, it gives us compelling, quirky protagonists we can identify with and intertwines the minutia of the financial system into the goals, obstacles, and story arcs of these men. Though McKay and Randolph utilize several narrative devices I don’t love—multiple narrators directly addressing the camera, breaking story continuity to explain complex concepts in whimsical ways, video clip montages meant to set time and place or contextualize ideas—these are few and far between and, for the most part, they work.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for McKay’s directing style. I wish McKay, the head writer for Saturday Night Live during one of its stronger eras, had more faith in the written word, but his bloated, semi-improvised comedy features rush through as many jokes as possible, never fully allowing a whole to form from the sum of its parts. The hurried approach is even more injurious to this primarily dramatic feature. The Big Short is not a patient movie and therefore it’s far less potent than J. C. Chandor’s tense and secretive Margin Call (2011)—still the best film made on this moment in history. McKay employs a pseudo-documentary shooting style that does nothing to enliven the narrative or make it seem more realistic or credible—it just draws attention to itself.  Rather then letting the story simply unfold and the viewer get swept up in the characters, McKay’s ADHD camera and editing style move us too quickly through the story, never giving us a chance to sit with ideas until the very end. The cast and script are strong enough to support a longer, more in-depth film, which could have been one of the year’s best pictures. Like Goodfellas, The Big Short gets us rooting for guys who would normally be considered “bad guys,” which is always interesting. But unlike Scorsese’s masterpiece, it lets these men (and many of the others who encouraged the 2007-2010 economic crisis) off the hook. Some preachy sentiments and on-the-nose dialogue from co-star/co-producer Brad Pitt take the place of the more substantive moralism that should underlie this narrative.

The Big Short is a mixed bag that I nonetheless recommend seeing. Better than any narrative or documentary film, TV show, or radio program I’ve yet seen or heard, it explains credit default swaps, sub-prime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, and other financial constructs in clear, comprehensible terms. It avoids dumbing things down to the point of condescension, yet somehow remains a rather unchallenging mainstream entertainment.