Review: The Big Short

The Big Short (15)

USA 2015  130 mins  Dir: Adam McKay  Starring: Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Marisa Tomei, Max Greenfield, Selena Gomez, Karen Gillan

Early in The Big Short, Anchorman and Talladega Nights director Adam McKay wheels on The Wolf of Wall Street Star Margot Robbie to break the fourth wall and address us directly to explain the sub-prime loan scandal while sitting naked in a bubble bath and sipping champagne. Later, Selena Gomez performs a similar function to elucidate synthetic collateralised debt obligations. He’s sailing dangerously close to trendy vicar territory, or those faintly embarrassing Shakespeare adaptations geared at making the Bard relevant to the yoof. But you have to admire McKay’s absolute determination to engage his dumbed-down idiot audience with the machinations of the dumbed-down idiots who caused the financial crisis. Indeed, much of this satirical Oscar long-shot’s (five nominations) pleasure hinges on astonishment that the protagonists of the collapse could have been quite so stupid. So while Steve Carell is carried over from the Anchorman cast, he plays a character who comes across as the charmless brother of The Office‘s Michael Scott ranged against a whole army of the Brick Tamlands who fucked up the global economy. It works because we’re really not that far from Dumb and Dumber here.

As briskly paced, slickly edited and snappily quotable is it is possible to be with such bone-dry material, McKay’s satire whisks us back to the point in 2005 when “bankers went from country club to the strip club”. Working from Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, he then intertwines the stories of the mavericks who spotted the impending financial catastrophe and decided to profit from it. The names have been changed, but they’re all based on real people. First up is metal-loving, glass-eyed, bare-footed eccentric Michael Burry (Bale), who combines dismal social skills with an uncanny ability to make shitloads of cash for investors. Blithely asserting that everybody is wrong, he detects the ‘lie at the heart of the economy’ and proceeds to make big money wagers against the housing market. The smug likes of Goldman Sachs, for whom ‘safe as houses’ is practically a mantra, laugh in his face and take his loot. Arrogant Burry’s backers start to get jittery, but he just slams his office door and blasts out Mastodon and Pantera at full volume while waiting for the inevitable. Gossip about his gamble attracts the attention of smarmy, greedy douche bag Deutsche Bank employee – and the film’s part-time narrator – Jared Vennett (Gosling), who joins forces with loud, obnoxious, self-loathing, deeply cynical and perpetually furious hedge fund supremo Mark Baum (Carell) to grab a share of the spoils. Meanwhile, a pair of outsiders attempt to blag a ticket to the big boys’ table by recruiting legendary ex-broker Ben Rickert (a beardy Brad Pitt), who’s gone all New Agey and paranoid.

Clearly, The Big Short will prove problematic for those who require likeable characters to empathise with, as it deals only in shades of scumbag. Rickert and Baum are both keenly aware that if they win big by betting against the US economy, the price will paid by ordinary people losing their jobs and homes. But this doesn’t stop them. Suspicious Baum even leads a fact-finding mission to sub-prime territory to find out whether Burry’s assertions about the junky nature of the mortgage market are correct, and is astonished to find strippers with five homes and people who’ve been granted NINJA loans in their dogs’ names by brokers who are interested only in their commission. It’s all strongly played, albeit in broad character strokes, and McKay keeps his outrage commendably in check almost until the end, when he has some fun with the way in which immigrants and poor people always get to shoulder the blame, while reminding us in the closing credits that the next disaster is just round the corner.