It’s the Funniest Movie of the Year Until It Isn’t: The Case for The Big Short

– Sometimes…it’s better for a man just to walk away.
– But if you can’t walk away?
– I guess that’s when it’s tough.

― Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

The big lie in America is that everybody has a shot at the American Dream — big money. In truth, we don’t. Some of us get lucky is all. A few are lucky to be born into it. Some are lucky to get a good education or to be well-placed in the social hierarchy. Others feel lucky if they can walk into a bank and some eager banker gives them a loan to buy a house — not just any house, their dream house — and puts in their desperate, empty hands the promise of the American Dream fulfilled.

For decades, millions of Americans believed in that dream, too. We believed that luck was ready to shine on us. Because, after all, we have a right to reach for the brass ring like everyone else, don’t we? Even if our electricity is about to be shut off, we can’t afford groceries for dinner, we’re still $200 behind in bank fees from overdrafts — look, someone just sent us an offer for a credit card with a $300 limit!

“Poor schmucks,” the financial con artists think. “Poor stupid schmucks will fall for anything if they think it will get them something. Something for nothing.” Like pipe-dreams of winning the Powerball, or writing a hot screenplay, or moving to Hollywood to become a movie star. We don’t just want to be well-off or wealthy, we want that extreme wealth. That vulgar Kardashian wealth. We want to dress our toddlers in $1200 real fur coats and shit out bricks of gold. We want it because that’s what we’ve been taught to want from birth. The shiny lies forged in Hollywood and honed on Madison Avenue.

Buy that, possess this, and it will make you happier. Own it, and people will respect you. Drive it, and girls will throw themselves at you. Eat it, come on, you won’t get fat. Eat it, because the models who eat it in commercials look so fucking cool. Buy it now, half off. Buy it now, it’s going to pay off when you sell it. How can you afford not to buy it? Buy piles of stuff and then buy a house to put it in. Buy it, because haven’t you always wanted a three-bedroom house with a garage, a washer and dryer, and a pretty blue pool out back for the kids? Buy it — who cares if your credit is shit. If the loan officer doesn’t hesitate, why should you? Buy it. Don’t worry. Nothing bad can happen to you.

Unfortunately, the dream is dangled like a wax carrot in front the most desperate among us. Consumerism drives our economy and who does the most consuming? America’s 500 billionaires? No way. The super-rich don’t consume. They make money off of the rest of us 300 million consumers. That’s our role in the scheme. This is what we do. Christmas? The annual chance for corporations to rake in money from struggling families trying to bring the magic back. Thanksgiving? A time to be grateful? Think again — it’s Black Friday. A shopping opportunity. Spend, spend, spend. If you can’t afford to spend, borrow so you can spend. If you can’t borrow on reasonable terms, take out a high risk loan that will probably bankrupt you, but hey, that’s all part of the plan. Someone somewhere has bet against you paying it back and guess what, they’re making money off of your failure and desperation. Ain’t it grand? Yep, every day in this country, those assholes on Wall Street are making billions off every tiny mistake that poor and middle-class people make in their fragile effort to get ahead.

A lot of people probably can’t understand this state of mind unless they’ve been at the bottom, the rock bottom, where desperate families take out payday loans and borrow against their cars to pay the rent. If you’ve ever been there, you’ll know that the system is designed for you to fail because the second you can’t pay the loan back, you’re done for – they’ll swoop in and take whatever little you have left.

The Big Short, one of the best films this year, is about that wobbly ethical line between big crimes and little crimes leading up to the 2008 financial meltdown. The Big Short is about a few people who saw what no one else could see — or maybe what they could see but couldn’t face — and decided to profit off of the catastrophe. They were able to profit off of it because no one was paying attention. The film’s narrator, Deutsche Bank trader Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), says stupidity was at the root of what happened. Others, like hedge fund manager Mike Burry (Christian Bale) say what happened was nothing but outright fraud.

Shaky subprime mortgage-backed securities were packed with thousands of bad loans — loans made up of the sad, failed dreams of millions of Americans trying to get what they thought was some kind of stability in home ownership. They didn’t have money, collateral, or adequate credit but they got the loans anyway. Because the real money for banks was in the selling regardless of the return. The banks hid their bad loans in batches disguised by a veneer of reliable loans and sold these packages to unsuspecting investors all over the world. Mike Burry, Jared Vennett (in real life, Greg Lippmann) and a few others took a closer look — saw the loans were doomed to fail and decided to buy shorts — or insurance — on those loans failing. If the loans stayed solvent, traders would have to pay the big banks monthly premiums. If the loans failed, the banks would have to pay them — and the profits would be in the billions.

Once the housing market started to decline, variable rates kicked in, and though loans all across the country began to fail, the banks refused to mark them in default. They continued to hide that information, repackaged the loans as elaborate CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), and tried to unload them before anyone figured out what was going on. This is the film’s Act Two crisis and it’s the most confusing part to people who don’t fully understand what’s happening. If they were investing on the failure of the bonds and the bonds failed, why weren’t the speculators happy? Because they saw that the big banks never intended to reveal the losses until they could recover some of their money first. The bankers and even the bond ratings services all lied to cover their asses, and in the process they defrauded millions of investors.

What makes The Big Short such a brilliant tour de force is the synergy between Michael Lewis’ incisive book, Charles Randolph’s vivid screenplay adaptation, and Adam McKay’s thrilling interpretation of Randolph’s adaptation. These three have collaborated to build an intricate, multi-layered, deeply moving, absurdly funny satirical tale that incorporates a cast not unlike a Greek chorus with an oily but charming unreliable narrator to explain just what happened and why it matters.

From Steve Carell, who has never been better, to Ryan Gosling who also has never been better, to Christian Bale who gives — flat out — the best performance of the year, The Big Short is driven by actors riffing off a great screenplay, directed by a guy who has never really shown such an attuned sense of human nature before. Adam McKay has always been funny, but his deeply profound side wasn’t so obvious.

You have to be quick on your feet to get The Big Short all in one pass — the running jokes throughout, the subtle digs, the impressive way McKay and Randolph have taken Michael Lewis’ book and turned seemingly insignificant details into whole character arcs and pivotal moments. What makes this film stand apart from the others in the Best Picture lineup is how distinct each character is from another. McKay inserts a single sentence by Brad Pitt’s Ben Rickert, “Seriously, a colonic once a year,” and that links to other funny things Rickert says about compost, and that joins to a shot of Rickert on an escalator — not just wearing a germ mask but waving to a fellow germophobe as he passes by. He’s not the only one. Every character in the film has his own string of tiny personality details like that. Each individual stands out lively and distinct with such subtle undercurrents that you can’t possibly get it all in one viewing. You can’t quite get a handle on the relationship Gosling’s Jared Vennett has with his assistant or catch why Porter Collins (Hamish Linklater) doesn’t like being touched, or all the ongoing jokes about finding good food in terrible places, or the gently awkward way Carell’s Mark Baum asks Kathy Tao (Adepero Oduye) how her quest for motherhood is going. It flies by at a breakneck pace. Maybe you catch it all, maybe you don’t. But rarely does any film pay that kind of attention to rounding out its characters.

Unlike Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short does not want you to tune out the details. The details here are vitally important; that’s why they’re left in. The filmmakers knew that all this complicated terminology would be hard to understand — and they are, believe me. I had to read Michael Lewis’ book twice, watch all of the Frontline documentaries available on the financial meltdown, view McKay’s film 9 or 10 times, and essentially grow a new part of my brain to house the concept because it was so far removed from anything I knew about before.

McKay and Randolph throw in pop culture figures to help explain — Margot Robbie basking in a luxury spa tub, Anthony Bourdian blending fishy leftovers in his kitchen, Selena Gomez taking infectious risks at the blackjack table. But those elements, too, enter the realm of the absurd because how can you pay attention to anything Margot Robbie is saying when she’s sitting naked in a bathtub? That’s part of the point: Nobody was paying attention to the sketchy reality because it was all so sexy and tantalizing. The Big Short, like Dr. Strangelove, is an absurdist comedy about something not very funny and (for a lot of unlucky people) quite boring. Alas, this is how we keep getting fleeced: we have no idea what the fuck is going on.

As horrible as these times are in which we live — where the rich are getting revoltingly richer and the poor are getting tragically poorer — we’re mired in the most disconnected, distracted, fractured culture in modern history as Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook consume so much of our time we forget to attend to what’s truly troubling. We click here, we click there; fave this and retweet that; and we think we’ve done our duty for the day. The latest outrage dealt with and solved from our keyboard clacks and screen taps. McKay captures this dynamic beautifully. He weaves through his story images of tragedy crashing all around us at all times: people losing their homes, people living on the street, and all the while we’re liking Facebook posts to make silly videos go viral. We live in a time when our attention is consumed by the unimportant, while most of us ignore the important things that affect our lives in a much broader and more significant sense.

With his free-roaming camera, his sharp eye for moments of humiliation and tenderness, his ease with actors and improv, his deep concern for the betterment of humanity, McKay has taken a big artistic risk and made a graceful leap — from raw comedy to something deeper, just as funny but far more tragic. What a joy it is to watch a filmmaker in such confident command of his narrative, so willing to let go of everything a safe director is supposed to do with a movie.

For all of its attention to what’s happening on Wall Street where the rich are continually screwing the poor on a minute-by-minute basis, The Big Short is actually about human beings, our relationships with one another, our desire to look out for each other, take care of each other, and the few among us who hang on to integrity against all odds.

We see that many of these guys — some of them, anyway, though not the narrator — wanted to do the right thing. Or at least never meant to hurt anyone. They just didn’t think it through. Didn’t consider how making huge profits off the collapsing housing market could be so wrong. We now know it’s wrong because we know how it all ended up. If a few dozen lucky fucks walk away with billions in their pockets because they were outsmarting the banks and ripping off the system, we now understand that screwing over the banks meant screwing over American citizens because eventually we’re the ones who had to bail out the banks. Who got hurt? It was us, not them.

Still, this is a case of high crimes and misdemeanors at every level. Shorting imploding loans because the banks were carelessly greedy is one thing. Goldman Sachs lending money to customers with blatant disregard for risk, then betting against those very loans — betting against their own clients — is criminal.

Thousands of people got filthy rich selling something for nothing to millions of people who also wanted something for nothing.  The Big Short is a cautionary cry into the blackness of a financial system built on corruption and thriving because of it. It is one exclamation point before the end of the sentence describing the pitiful end of an empire, once so glorious and full of hope now on the precipice of its own demise.

There is no excuse for walking away from The Big Short and not understanding it when everything you need to know is in the book, in the film, and in countless documentaries readily available to help walk you thorough it. If you willfully walk away from such an essential film then you are part of the problem. McKay’s film isn’t preachy. From its opening pull-away shot of hundreds of abandoned tract homes financed god knows how, to its final scene of a drained and defeated Mark Baum finally selling his shorts and becoming one of them, it’s pure appalling pleasure.