Review #1,000: 'The Big Short' (2015)

With a career built around Will Ferrell vehicles such as Anchorman (2004), Step Brothers (2008) and The Other Guys (2010), writer/director Adam McKay has made an astonishing leap into the big-leagues with The Big Short, clearly a passion project that discusses the inner workings of the housing market and subprime loans and manages to make it entertaining, funny and infuriating all at the same time. It tells the story of the financial crisis that hit the U.S. and eventually the rest of the world in 2007, and the men who foresaw it and profited hugely from the disaster while nobody paid attention.

Adapted from Michael Lewis's novel of the same name, The Big Short tells three non-intertwining stories. One-eyed hedge-fund manager Michael Burry (Christian Bale) suffers from Asperger's, but what he lacks in social skills he makes up for in sheer ability to read numbers. He is the only person to take a look at the housing market in detail and sees its collapse as a certainty. Visiting several banks, he bets against the market while the staff laugh behind his back. Spray-tanned trader Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), who also serves as our fourth-wall-breaking narrator, catches wind of this and, realising that Burry's predictions are likely correct, decides to bring his credit-swap dealings to the attention of other potential investors.

One person who is convinced by Vennett's proposal is Mark Baum (Steve Carell), a hedge fund manager with anger issues and a hatred of The Man, who, along with his team, starts to investigate these distressing claims for himself and learns that the banks have been selling collateralised debt obligations - loans made up of worthless bonds given fraudulent AAA ratings. Small-time investors Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) also want their piece of the action but are below the capital threshold to make a worthwhile profit and so employ Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt), a former Wall Street trader turned reclusive organic-obsessive, to assist them with their trades.

If it all sounds a touch confusing, it's because it is. The entire housing market was wrapped up in so many layers of bull-shit that it took a weird genius such as Burry to actually see it for what it was. McKay is aware of this too, and to ensure that attention doesn't wander during those important moments of exposition, he employs celebrities such as Margot Robbie, Anthony Bourdain and Selena Gomez to explain it to the audience in simple terms. The film doesn't think that the audience is stupid, but simply acknowledges just how dull the subject matter is. The fact that the banks ultimately escaped punishment and were bailed out by the government reinforces the importance of the general public's understanding of how they operated to ensure it doesn't happen again (although the sobering revelations at the climax reveal that they're at it again already).

The cast is uniformly flawless. Carell is the stand-out. with his Baum serves as the film's simmering champion of the little people. While he works in stocks, he holds nothing but disdain for the way his country operates. Bale is terrific too, careful not to paint Burry as a cartoon character as he slumps around his office in shorts and bare feet and pounds air-drums to heavy metal (Bale also has the uncanny ability to move each of his eyes independently, removing the need for a fake glass eye). While Gosling's Vennett is your typical grease-ball suit, he revels in the characters arrogance and projects enough charisma to even convince Baum to trust him. Despite the ensemble, the real hero is McKay who resists laying on the style too thickly and delivers a film bursting with energy, maturity and humour. Of the Academy's 2015 Best Picture line-up, The Big Short is my pick for film of the year.


Directed by: Adam McKay
Starring: Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Jeremy Strong, Rafe Spall, John Magaro, Finn Wittrock, Brad Pitt, Marisa Tomei
Country: USA

Rating: *****

Tom Gillespie