If you plan to see just one movie this year, it is highly recommended you watch The Big Short. If you plan to see just two movies, then make it a The Big Short double feature.
This movie is one heck of an angry, super-funny tragicomedy on the events that led to the collapse of the housing bubble and eventually the entire American economy on September, 2008. However, the movie is not about the financial institutions that broke the law, the watchdog that did nothing, the rating agencies that lied to the public, or the government that continued to remove all regulations. It is about the guys who “shorted” the banks that ripped off everyone else. A “short” is a financial bet that brings profit as the price falls.
The movie is based on Michael Lewis’s terrific book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine that tells the remarkable true story through fascinating characters. Surprisingly, these people are not anti-heroes but idealists and were not very happy to see the too-big-to-fail banks fail while millions of others lose everything.
But the question remains that how can anyone turn an economics book into a hugely entertaining movie?
Firstly, the screenplay is superb. Tedious information from the book is condensed into a line of dialogue or a quick scene. For example, the SEC (the toothless watchdog) is represented by a young woman in a pool; and the Rating Agencies (the lying endorsers) by a blind old woman in a cramped room.
Writer-director Adam McKay, who debuted with the comedy classic Anchorman (2004), uses title cards, famous quotes, still photographs, music videos, and celebrities to inject the financial gobbledygook into the pop-culture. The film editing plays a major role there. For example, as Steve Carell comes to a shocking conclusion, at a restaurant in Las Vegas, the frame freezes on his close-up and zooms-in as Sweet Child of Mine by Guns N’ Roses plays in the background. That’s pure cinematic beauty.
Ryan Gosling (as the banker who hates bankers) is the cynical omnipresent narrator of this dark fairytale. Steve Carell (as the bully that protects the little guys) is the moral center of the film and asks all the important questions (mostly yelling them out). Christian Bale, as Dr. Michael Burry, the first person to notice the housing fraud, steals the show completely. Unlike the others, Burry does not use any profanity when he is upset, he just plays the drums while listening to heavy metal. Brad Pitt is there too, as the disillusioned trader who has lost all faith in the free market.
The Big Short is among the great films made about the stock market, along with Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), Inside Job (2010), Margin Call (2011), and Wolf of Wall Street (2013).
It ends with the famous Led Zeppelin song When the Levee Breaks which was originally written by an American blues band in 1929, soon after the most destructive flood in US history:
“Cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good,
When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move.”