by Charles Randolph & Adam McKay (screenplay); Michael Lewis (book)
Plan B Entertainment
I know. I KNOW. A movie about the financial crisis and the crash of 2008 and the people who bet against the housing market (and won BIG) doesn’t sound that good. Or entertaining. Or interesting. Throw in the fact that it was directed by the dude that made Anchorman and Talledega Nights and you have yourself a potential hot ass mess.
But it had a few things going for it. It’s based on the book by Michael Lewis- the guy who explained Moneyball ( A | BN | K | G | AB | Au | Scribd ) to us- and it was backed by Brad Pitt’s production company, who brought us Selma and 12 Years a Slave and The Departed, so… well, maybe.
YOU GUYS. This is one of the best put together movies I’ve ever seen. About ten minutes in, I was thinking, “Oh my god I’ve made a huge mistake” and then things kick into high gear and I UNDERSTOOD THE FINANCIAL CRISIS (like I texted my Dad, who once tried to explain the stock market to me and I looked at him like he grew a fourth head and he’s super proud of me right now).
The Big Short covers the years leading up to the total and utter collapse of the financial markets, and how everyone and every entity working on residential mortgages was complicit in allowing a mostly unregulated system go completely batshit insane until it burst. Ryan Gosling plays Jared Vennett, a bond salesman at Deutsche Bank who narrates most of the movie- explaining directly to the camera what’s going on and if certain things really happened the way they’re portrayed. It’s a really clever device.
It’s a complicated subject, and in order for the audience to actually understand what happened, there were times when the narrative would have to come to a screeching halt to explain what a sub-prime mortgage is, or how one repackages bonds to make them look like they are full of good mortgages. Instead of trying to shove that kind of exposition awkwardly into dialogue that no one would say, the movie literally stops, and Gosling will go “Okay, to explain how sub-prime mortgages work, here is Margot Robbie in a bubble bath to explain it to you.” And sure enough, we get Margot Robbie, explaining in simple and effective terms, and when she is done she tells everyone to fuck off. You can see a bit of it here:
It’s like being so transparent in the “use a pretty girl to explain some shit” that it goes completely around the corner from “gross” to “so brilliant it works.” The other times that the narrative needs to come to a halt is exactly at the points that I went “I have no idea what you’re talking about” and then Ryan Gosling went, “Okay, so you don’t know what this is, so here’s Anthony Bordain or Selena Gomez to help explain it.”
Thanks, Ryan.
Here’s the other clever thing: the protagonists of the movie are guys who figured out that the housing market was going to crash, and it was going to crash hard. And they figured out how to make a FUCKTON of money off of it. An actual, literal FUCKTON. And while most of them have various levels of guilt over this- betting that the economy will crash, millions will lose their homes, unemployment will skyrocket, and if that happens, they get rich- that guilt doesn’t stop them.
As Vennett says, looking at his check for $49,000,000, “I’m not the hero in this story.” He’s not. None of them are. The movie knows it, and wants you to know that, too.
The acting is top notch. Steve Carrell, whose post-Office career has been FASCINATING, is the guy with the biggest conscience. Christian Bale (loved you since Newsies, Chris- I know you hate hearing that but it’s true) is the first guy to see that this was going to happen. Brad Pitt is the guy who tried to get out of the money game but got sucked back in.
Yeah, it’s a SUPER bro-like movie. But let’s face it, finance is kind of a bro-y industry. There really aren’t any women involved, except as Explainers or as some form of emotional support for the dudes (and in the case of Michael Burry’s wife, completely unseen. She’s in pictures on his desk and a voice on the phone).
What I’m still very impressed by is that The Big Short took a subject that affected us all in one way or another, a huge, complicated thing that a lot of people don’t really understand, and attempted to make it understandable. Like sub-prime mortgages happened because the banks wanted more mortgages to sell, so they started lending out money to anyone who could sign a piece of paper- no income, no job? No problem. You get a house. Never mind that in two years when your introductory payments suddenly triple, you won’t be able to pay them. That’s not the bank’s problem, that’s a problem for who ever bought your mortgage, and they don’t give a fuck.
At one point, when contemplating the incoming disaster, one of the characters says, “This will be the death of capitalism.” It wasn’t, and there are many days that I think that’s a shame. Capitalism is the root of many problems the US has right now, and after this crisis, has anything changed? No, not really.
It’s the year of the message movie, y’all. I hope people are listening.
The Big Short is in theaters now and you can find tickers (US) at Fandango and Moviefone.
I work in the financial services field, and I just saw this film on Monday. I agree with everything you said. I’ve been telling my friends to go see it, because it explains very complex concepts (synthetic CDOs!)in layman’s terms. Of course, I also walked out of the theater upset that not one of the big Wall Street fat cats and ex-CEOs paid for what happened. It’s downright scary that not much has changed since then. One of my favorite scenes was when Brad Pitt told the others not to dance, that they were betting against the American economy. This is one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time.
I have been a “Wall Street” lawyer for decades and the housing disaster is not the first time that greed lead bankers to lower underwriting standards ultimately leading to a bust which rippled through the economy, it was merely the worst. I blame Reagan and his push to deregulate and strangle government so it doesn’t have the resources to perform the regulatory functions that are left.
This movie was brilliant. I didn’t need the education and I can quibble with some of the details (No one says I S D A, it is always pronounced as one word, Isda), but I have heard lawyers way smarter than I am praising this movie and how well it explained those complex instruments.
It is a very entertaining movie while being very moral at its core.
To me, the movie had its very comic moments but it was just so sad because I saw the devastation that came to innocent people; jobs lost, houses foreclosed upon; etc. In my profession, there is an entire generation of law school graduates, called the “lost generation” who graduated at the wrong time, immediately lost their high paying jobs, had hundreds of thousands of dollars of student loans and no chance of getting a legal job, or maybe any job at all.
::raises hand:: one of that generation right here.
I read this book when it first came out, and I just encourage anyone who enjoyed the movie (which I agree was really wonderful) to read the book. It was a really engaging read and did a good job explaining the details of how the different instruments work. In addition, I would recommend “Liar’s Poker” by the same author, which is about the 1980s bond shenanigans when Michael Lewis was working on Wall Street… it’s arguably his best book and reminds you that these guys have been up to this shit for a long time.
As a side note, I’m sad that Christian Bale got the nom out of this movie instead of Steve Carrell… I thought Steve stole the show.
I echo the reviews and the comments especially to actually read the book. It will make you both mad and sad.
And if you own any stocks–even in a mutual fund or 401K–read Michael Lewis’ latest book–Flash Boys–about electronic trading. Lord but Lewis makes you feel like you are doomed to be outmaneuvered by finance guys with no conscience but lots and lots of greed who skirt or bend if not break the law. AND get away with it richer than ever.
I feel like the odd man out because I really didn’t enjoy this movie. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the financial goings on, I’ve been listening to Planet Money since it started up so feel very comfortable with the topics. I think that may be one of the reasons I didn’t enjoy it. It felt like it was talking down to me. And I found the cutaways to hot chick to explain something super grating. It didn’t get to “So brilliant it works” territory for me, just stuck in “gross” and lazy territory. I also wasn’t a fan of the long edits of every man/news clips to show what else was going on in the world during this time. The seemed to go on for longer than needed and dragged down the plot momentum. Yes, the acting was good, but overall I’d give the movie a C and really hope it doesn’t get any of the Oscars it’s up for.
Thank you so much for reviewing the film!! We got caught up the housing market and did end up losing our house (job transfer and selling the house after the bubble burst was a nightmare). I did read the book and I am going to see the movie next…and then I’ll probably read the book again…and then I’ll grab a historical romance book just for a satisfying HEA (this is precisely the time I turned to the romance genre).
I am currently listening to the book Dark Money by Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker. It traces the billions of dollars flooding our political system by the richest families in America. These are the folks who brought you the housing bubble and the Wall Street bail-out. Anyone remember Enron? How about the gutting of the EPA and the FDA? It is an easy, frightening listen or read. After reading The Big Short and Dark Money, all I can say is, no matter your political affiliation, please register and vote. It’s the only way to combat any of this.
I overall loved this movie but hated the vignettes (not the bits where the Gosling character speaks directly to the audience, or uses Jenga to explain tranches – those were fine and good). Hated them. They felt to me like the movie suddenly didn’t trust that I could keep up (I was keeping up fine) or that finance needed to be made “cute” to be compelling. I found it a serious error by the filmmakers. Even if you didn’t understand a complex financial instrument exactly, you understood the stakes and the emotions the characters had (ie “this is extremely risky and a bad idea”) and I think that was enough and the movie should have trusted the audience to put it together.
I particularly didn’t find the Robbie scene charming. It really, really annoyed me. The vignette scenes didn’t feel to me to be able to believably project a character’s understanding of an instrument so I just felt annoyed by the cutesiness and fake irony. (It’s not ironic if your hot chick in a bath explains something scene is literally just a hot chick in a bath and there’s no twist to make it ironic! I felt the same way about the scene where a stripper explains her finances to Steve Carell, like the movie wants us both to pretend that this is ironic and Carell is too cool to be into it, but also, we found a way to put breasts in this movie about mortgages.)
But I liked a lot of the other parts of it, particularly Steve Carell’s group, “America’s angriest hedge fund”.
I saw this movie on Christmas Day (in keeping with my tradition of seeing horribly depressing movies on Christmas Day, and yes, this movie is horribly depressing) and I LOVED IT. I’ve been telling all my coworkers (who are in the process of buying houses) to see it. Easily one of the best movies I saw last year.
I agree with everything in your review. I resisted seeing the movie because I am still dealing with the fallout from the mortgage crisis (the house I got in 2007 is still not worth what I paid for it and I am still making payment on a subprime loan) but I really enjoyed the movie.
One thing really bothered me: I also noticed the lack of women, and originally brushed it off as unfortunate but typical of some industries. I liked the movie so much that I researched the book. The book details how analyst Meredith Whitney predicted the crisis and was known as “The Oracle” after the fact. She was completely left out of the movie.
It bothers me that the men get all the credit for predicting (and profiting) off of this when a woman also called it. While she didn’t make money off “shorts”, she is very well respected in the financial world. It’s disturbing that she was not included.
I’d been wondering about The Big Short since I heard about the book and then heard a movie was being made. I was contracting at a large financial institution while all the real estate shenanigans were going on. Our engineers had to quickly set up networks for settlement offices which was a fancy way of saying “offices for the contract workers who take the houses away” when it all came crashing down. I still cringe when I think about it and wasn’t sure I was ready for the book or movie. Thanks for the review and the comments.
@ Joy – a friend of mine who is a network engineer in the trading world recommended Flash Boys. I worked on an electronic trading project a few years ago with him and it was enlightening. Nanoseconds mean the world in electronic trading and millions in the pockets of the traders.
Saw it last weekend. On one hand hugely entertaining. On the other hand so sexist I had to grit my teeth. Yes, I get hi finance has few women, but in the six scenes with women, one is naked in a bubble bath, one has naked shoulders and arms in a fancy dress, one is a stripper giving a private dance, one is a “crone” much older deliberately uglied-up professional woman, one was a young federal official in a bathing suit by a pool(!) and one was a wife whose entire role was to be concerned about her husband.
No it did not remotely pass the Bechtel test. Plus, two stripper scenes. Because Hollywood.
No good reason why Selena for example couldn’t speak intelligently during her guest shot – instead she stood there like arm candy while MEN explained things to her.
So, entertained AND horrified.
This movie is bloody brilliant. Afterwards, read Griftopia by Matt Taibbi. Then get out your pitchforks!
I loved this movie. Unlike a couple of other reviewers I liked the exposition cameos. It was just one more unusual element in a chaotic movie, which complemented the chaotic story being told. I left the theater with a desire to learn more, talk to others and be a more informed investor and voter. One of my favorite movies in some time.
Back in the 80s, I was a CPA and audited savings & loans in Texas and had a front row seat to that crisis. The subprime crisis was the same scam, bigger scale. So expect another financial crisis in about 20 years, because: greed.
This movie is excellent. My favorite part was when Steve Carrell and his group went to Florida to see what was happening in real life. Overall, the acting and direction was superb. Currently my favorite for Best Picture.
I was working for the nation’s biggest lender in late 2006, as a loan processor and funder, when I had a blinding flash of revelation. One of those “oh my God, this is all imaginary money, it’s the Emperor’s new clothes, we are so screwed” kind of things. Then I spent six months crying in the parking lot on my breaks while I tried to find a way out of that job (the money was so, so, sooooo good…) and eventually just threw my career out and started over completely.
I am so very thankful that this movie exists, that the whole mess is being explained to people in terms that most will understand. If it helps prevent it from happening again, great! I’m still sick at heart when I remember the loans our office did for 7-11 clerks, allowing them to buy $600,000 houses.
OK, I won’t keep ranting – but thanks for the review!
I’m glad you reviewed the movie and that it’s getting people talking. Here’s an alternative view of what the movie and the book get wrong. I offer it only because I feel there’s a lot of depth here in this post (perhaps too much for some because it’s long) that can be added to what was presented in the movie.
I also recommended the comment section of this site. The moderators are touch notch and the community stays on point for the most part without a lot of attacks. So it is well worth your time to wade in because this community’s ability to discuss posts gave me more understanding even if I still get overwhelmed with the heavy technical posts. They keep me coming back to try to learn more.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/12/debunking-the-big-short-how-michael-lewis-turned-the-real-villains-of-the-crisis-into-heros.html
I saw this movie a couple of weeks ago–after some hesitation because I was like, “is this really something I’m interested in seeing, or am I just going because I’m in the mood for movie-style popcorn?” I really enjoyed it. Knowing very little about the housing market fiasco, I was glad to have the vignettes–although really, was it necessary for Margot Robbie to be in a bubble bath? Couldn’t she have been on the set of a movie or something less titillating? But: Hollywood. Whatever. And like Mara, I was disappointed that Christian Bale got the Oscar nod over Steve Carell because I felt Carell’s character was the heart of the movie.
I haven’t seen The Big Short yet, but will. In 2011 HBO aired Too Big to Fail–that was the first time I really grasped the greed that brought about the economic collapse. It is very well done, and also very disheartening.
I’m looking forward to seeing The Big Short even though I am disappointed to learn that The Oracle is invisible in it. I understand storytellers have to draw an outline and sometimes every character isn’t inside it, but still.
Also, I think Steve Carell has great work inside him, also I like his face. Christian Bale may be a fine actor but he does nothing for me. 🙂 #shallow
Yes! I just read an article that echoed my sentiments about not including One of the only female “heroes” of this crisis.
The url was stripped out of my original post.
http://themuse.jezebel.com/the-big-short-director-on-casting-mostly-white-men-we-1755267414
I definitely have to see this movie. I worked for Bear Stearns for a decade, and they were one of the companies that went bankrupt during the 2008 financial crisis. You have no idea how this shook people up, including me. Bear was an old and supposedly conservatively run firm. I mean, they survived the Wall St, Crash of 1929 without any layoffs! Yet the mortgage meltdown destroyed them.
I had already left by then, but my ESOP(Employee Stock Ownership Plan) which is what they gave us in lieu of a fixed pension, went completely down the drain.
And yes, the financial industry is total bro territory.