Entertaining movie, but completely misses the big picture

Rating: 8/10 (15 April 2016)

The Big Short is superbly-acted and well-written. Brad Pitt, Steve Carrell and their supporting cast give great performances, but the shocker for me was Christian Bale's portrayal of a brilliant fund manager with Asperger's syndrome who can "do the math" and read markets with unnerving clarity and correctness even when the results go completely against the grain of conventional thinking.
Bale inhabited this character, based on Dr. Michael Burry, with stunning effect as if he actually had this difficult to identify condition. It was a stunning transformation and masterful feat of acting. The tortured humanity of Carrell's character also came through luminously as his conscience wrestled with profiting from the economic collapse and the stupidity and dishonesty of the immediate circumstances that preceded it. But Bale's performance was by far the more subtle and awe-inspiring to me.
Michael Lewis' story is compelling on a human level, describing the tribulations down in the trenches as three different hedge funds bet against the housing bubble mortgage market and derivatives on it. It highlights human greed and stupidity, and the inertia of huge institutions. But it also highlights very different life experiences of three very different funds, one on Wall Street, another in Silicon Valley, and another originally from a garage in Colorado.
The production is very stylish and bright, presumably to dress up what might otherwise be a dull topic. The anguish at the stupidity of the situation, where banks are packaging toxic assets as if they were investment grade also creates emotional space for the actors to explore, but ultimately the story is told with an unduly heavy hand, as one might expect from Hollywood. The events are dramatic enough that a little scaling back of the acting might have served the story better. But Hollywood movies don't work that way; someone always gets to take the lead and ham it up, while others play it straight.
What's disappointing is that The Big Short is ultimately a highly orthodox, doctrinaire, short-sighted, lightweight and ignorant critique of capitalism. The film, and presumably Lewis (I have not read the book it's based on) completely miss the big picture context of government regulations forcing banks to make subprime loans as a form of "social justice" by getting otherwise unqualified buyers into home loans. This is touched on briefly in the scenes with the mortgage brokers, but the movie perhaps intentionally ignores the context of why it happened in the first place. It is blind to the underlying causes.
I can only suppose that this is because it goes against the orthodox leftist premise that business, markets and capitalism are bad, and that governments must act in opposition to them lest they prey upon innocent people. The reality is that government policies forcing banks to make bad loans created the situation, starting decades earlier. The culmination was collapse, but the fundamental cause was government intervention in the economy. Even Congressman Barney Frank, a staunch champion and initiator of such intervention, ultimately admitted this was a mistake after the crash.
Google for the Community Reinvestment Act and the role of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in underwriting bad loans and educate yourself about the facts. Don't be spoonfed incomplete and one-sided information.