The Big Short

I can’t think of another film like The Big Short. It explains the economic meltdown of 2008 with a rage at the fraudulent banking system and the government that coddles it. But this — in effect — lecture is presented as a satiric montage of cultural references woven through the stories of the five principals who bet on the mortgage bubble collapsing and taking the economy down with it. They bet their success on the economy’s failure. 

The five lead figures are variously outsiders who see past the industry’s smugness and are disturbed by the banks’ corruption and irresponsibility. Each has his own quirks and offbeat temperament — because only they can strike an outside perspective on the system. 

Paradoxically, the first to see through that system is the one-eyed maverick, Michael Burry, an MD turned investment broker. We’re not told what kind of doctor he is, but to through Wall Street like that he must be a proctologist. In the kingdom of the willfully blind the one-eyed man is king. 

In contrast, the Standard and Poor exec who reluctantly admits the bond ratings are sham wears dark wraparound shades, that express her inscrutability and compromised vision. 

At least three — Burry, Mark Baum and Ben Rickert — are idealists, with an earnest desire to see justice served on the corrupt banks.  Charlie Geller and Jaimie Shipley are spirited young hustlers itching to crack the closed game. 

Our interest in the five engaging men gives this economics lesson a real hook. The human drama brings the financial story to life. Adding to the film’s humour and wild spirit, director Adam McKay tosses in comic inserts. In a bubble bath a sexy champagne-sipping blonde explains one matter of high finance, a famous chef another.
     To distance itself from its corrupt characters, sometimes a character admits to the camera that a scene didn’t really happen the way it’s being played. Sometimes for emphasis he tells us that an outrageous scene actually happened that way. This reminds us we’re watching a story more truthful than the usual “based on…” fictionalization. This is our financial system and government at “work.”

The montage of shots from the media, from a tent city, from activities across the American social spectrum, make a key point about this bursting of the mortgage bubble. The drama didn’t happen in isolation, however detached the moneymen may be. As the retired Rickert reminds his two celebrating colleagues, the social collapse inherent in the short-sellers’ success means thousands will lose their jobs, their homes, their pensions, their futures, their families and lives. The mortgage bubble didn’t happen in a bubble but with wide-ranging and real, tragic consequences for thousands of innocents. The cultural references remind us that the cut-throat capitalism we see here is not a freakish exception but indeed an essential element of the capitalist culture.  

Indeed the film packages the dense information and historic reconstruction as a very human story, primarily through our engagement with the characters, but also through the comic play in the additional material. The sombre subject matter closes with the ominous warning that the same corrupt practice continues, with no reform to the economic system and virtually no punishment for the fraudulent bankers whose greed almost destroyed the world economy. But the human stories, the jokes, the rich vein of visual material, make this tragedy feel almost comic. The film doesn’t change the economic fraud or end the greed, but it makes the hard lesson not just palatable but a pleasure. 

Perhaps the film’s key justification is the quote from Mark Twain: “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.“ Now we know how wrong our trust was in our economic system, in our banks and our brokers, and in the government that’s supposed to place the common weal ahead of its rich friends’. 

     From novelist Haruki Murakami comes the climactic resignation: “Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.” Bernie Sanders must love this film.