Noble effort comes up a bit, well, short

Rating: 4/10 (29 March 2016)

The Big Short (TBS) is a moderately below-average film that stumbles in a couple basic areas. I found myself in the metaphorical shoes of stock analyst Michael Baum (Steve Carrell) who cannot believe he is watching a slow-motion train wreck no one else either understands or cares a whit about.
I'm unsure many early glowing reviewers actually watched the film. One giveaway: TBS is saturated with irony mustier than an underground cavern, yet few deemed it worthy of comment. From the one-eyed hedge fund manager Michael Burry (Christian Bale) who sees what others cannot, to the compromised ratings agency woman whose vision is (literally) impaired, it's nearly endless. The alligator lurking in the backyard pool at the abandoned Florida development? Wait, is that a metaphor?
There's meta-irony mixed in with their praise: TBS is largely about people who willfully overrated mortgage bonds and thereby misled others for personal gain. I wonder if some purposely overrated TBS for analogous reasons.
Full disclosure: I've worked on Wall Street for 25 years, both as a humble accountant and an opinionated research analyst. I've seen virtually all major Wall-Street-related films of the past 25-30 years, most more than once. Like the old joke about "Caddyshack" and its sequel, "Wall Street" far and away is the best of the genre, and "Wall Street II" the worst. I admire Michael Lewis, and I read TBS at least twice.
The director's main conceit, that people can't enjoy a movie about a financial scandal without regular distractions including naked lovelies taking bubble baths, celebrity chefs, and comely actresses playing themselves in cameos, was a BIG disappointment. Underestimating the audience downgraded the similarly stylish and well-cast "Margin Call," in my view, terminally afraid to explain exactly why the fictional bank was going belly-up.
Examples abound where a film both informs about the world of finance and entertains without annoying asides and sophomoric time-outs: "Wall Street" let us in on the world of mergers and acquisitions, risk arbitrage, and insider trading, "Boiler Room" limned the high-pressure sales tactics of unscrupulous brokers who operate in, well, boiler rooms. "Wolf of Wall Street" channeled "Boiler Room", "Goodfellas", and a sand grain of "Wall Street" to illuminate the dangers of charismatic pied pipers pitching penny stocks to suckers. Plus it made much better use of Margot Robbie (Margot Robbie).
Instead of drowning the audience in complex terminology like Credit Derivative Obligations (CDOs) and Credit Default Swaps (CDSs), why not just stick with "mortgage bonds" (MBs) and "put options?" TBS cries out for the technique Rob Lowe suggests in "Thank you for Smoking": just add a line of dialogue to quickly explain what a soon-to-be-forgotten financial product is used for. Then move on.
Movies like "Wall Street" and books like "The Great Crash 1929" place financial bubbles squarely in the context of human nature: People will rampantly speculate on the value of stocks and/or real estate, their values will eventually inflate, and then ultimately the bubble will pop. Stocks. Real estate. Inflate. Pop. Rinse and repeat. I suppose TBS is about bonds and real estate. Whatever, it's not that new.
Roughly 90% of every financial crisis boils down to one thing: Money is borrowed that won't be repaid. 1929 crash. 1980s S&L crisis. 2007 sub-prime mortgages. Follow the borrower. The other 10% is the colorful detail movies are made of. In 2016, it'll be shale petroleum-based loans and junk bonds that blow up. Yawn.
The cast is first-rate and production values uniformly high. Ryan Gosling was very good as Jared Vennett, the unicorn who both works for an I-bank yet comprehends the inherently unsustainable underpinnings of the MBs they create. His Jenga scene explaining how MBs are constructed was my favorite.
Some scenes utterly lack accuracy. Burry visits Goldman Sachs to ask them to craft a brand-new, never-before-devised contract to make a huge bet against the US housing market. Two spiffy junior bankers across the table (whom I'll nickname Muffy and Sanjay) quickly agree to write the unique contract then and there.
Umm, no way, Sanjay. Brand new derivatives with novel risks that require bank capital to be set aside might take several weeks to put together. Muffy and Sanjay need to successfully navigate at least a couple of Risk Committee approval processes, plus invest serious time with internal lawyers and an external regulatory agency for good measure. Ouch.
Other times I confess no clue what the film wants to convey. The scene with two young Coloradans (TYCs) in the lobby of JP Morgan Chase is one example. If I understand, the TYCs first get summarily rejected, then stumble upon a pitch book left on a lobby bench (?) that outlines the entire short-the-sub-prime-market thesis. Then one TYC looks directly into the camera and informs us this scene never actually happened; they simply cadged the impending sub-prime crisis idea from a friend. Huh? I'm confused. You either take artistic license or you don't, but not both. There went the "Best Editing" Oscar.
Most financial flicks are chock-full of memorable quotes. "Wall Street" alone could fill a small Kindle ("Greed is good", "Lock and load," "Blue Horseshoe loves Annacott Steel," "So the falcon has heard the falconer?" "American Express has got a hit-man looking for me," "The illusion has become real," "Because it's wreckable"). "Boiler Room" actually includes a worshipful paean to "Wall Street"'s quotability. There's nothing similarly memorable in TBS. In a screenplay cut from prime Michael Lewis-woven cloth, this in itself constitutes a financial-bubble-sized scandal.
Final irony: By placing full blame upon the banks, the filmmakers actually may delude viewers about the risks of history repeating itself and the public's ultimate responsibility for their financial matters. They thereby render a recurrence of this sad chapter in our recent economic history more likely. A second bubble bath scene, with Barney Frank explaining his indispensable role in this whole mess, would be a teaching moment like none other.