Banking was once “like money in the bank.” It was stable verging on staid—until the late ’70s when Wall Street wise guys decided it was all too boring and that buckets of money could be reaped by playing fast and loose. While most Americans were preoccupied with “Dallas,” corrupt financiers turned their line of work into the country’s growth industry (if you can call an unproductive enterprise an industry). The Big Short depicts what happened when the favorite meat of the financial sharks—mortgage-backed securities—went rotten. The debacle occurred in 2008, pitching the world’s economy to the rim of the abyss and precipitating the Great Recession.
Assuming most people have no clue thanks to the gnomic obfuscations of Alan Greenspan and other titans of finance, director and co-writer Adam McKay finds clever ways of outlining how it went down. The Big Short cuts to celebrities such as actress Margot Robbie (sipping champagne in her bathtub) and chef Anthony Bourdain (preparing fish stew), who offer easy-to-follow definitions. As they explain, a mortgage-backed security bundles thousands of mortgages into an attractive-looking, ostensibly high-yield investment; pension funds and other investors rushed to buy. The bankers made a fortune selling mortgages into bundled securities, and when they ran out of prime mortgage applicants, they went subprime, lending money to people who couldn’t afford coffee at Starbucks, much less a house.
As Greenspan and his confederates built an ideology of limitless growth on quicksand, several insiders were sharp enough to see through the mirage—and they were outsiders among their blind-sided colleagues. Based on the book by financial reporter Michael Lewis, The Big Short depicts a fascinating bunch of oddballs who knew Greenspan was wrong and that the housing bubble would burst. Socially awkward Michael Burry (Christian Bale) is nearly autistic but brilliant with numbers; angry-guy Mark Baum (Steve Carell) applies his Talmudic erudition to Wall Street and sees a house of cards waiting to tumble; Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) calmly lays plans to profit from the bubble once it bursts; and newbie investors Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) get onboard, essentially betting that the housing market would fail.
The Big Short’s satire is sharp as a scalpel as it performs a postmortem on the events of 2008, which saw the economy nearly destroyed by the stupidity of experts and the complacency of regulators. The public bears responsibility, too, for following the experts like sheep over a cliff.
The Big Short
4 stars
Steve Carell
Ryan Gosling
Directed by Adam McKay
Rated R
