If you had told me a year ago that the most powerfully useful American film of 2015 would be brought to us by the man who helmed “Talladega Nights,” I would have told you to fix your damn time machine. Yet it is absolutely true that Adam McKay, the goofball extraordinaire who gave us such national treasures as “Anchorman,” has directed and co-written “The Big Short,” the adaptation of Michael Lewis’s 2010 nonfiction bestseller about the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market. What’s that, you say? Put simply, McKay has crafted the definitive movie about the 2008 worldwide economic meltdown that stemmed from the bursting of the American housing bubble – and he’s done so with rigorous detail and more than a spoonful of his slapstick sugar.
Sugar is the operative term here, and even as we’re gobbling it up, we’re made aware that this is exactly how our country got itself in such a financial black hole in the first place. Start with the eye candy that is Ryan Gosling, who plays Jared Vennett, the Slick Rick narrator doubling as a banker whose alpha-douchery actually outstrips that of his colleagues. He’s been lucky enough to notice the seemingly insane-in-the-membrane investments of financial idiot-savant Michael Burry (Christian Bale), who’s prone to blasting death rock while crunching numbers and rubbing his smelly, naked feet. After sifting through the kazillions of individual mortgages that make up the securities underwriting so much of the banking industry, Burry has decided to bet against the housing market by investing more than a billion dollars of his clients’ money into credit default swaps. Scratching your head yet? Just wait, there’s more. Vennett ropes in mega-misanthropic hedge funder Mark Baum (a wild-eyed Steve Carell), and the two go into the credit-default-swap business, as does the pee-wee investment team of Charles Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock), who enlist former banker Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt, who also co-produces), a New Age-y Cassandra, to help them play in the big leagues. Continue Reading →
