who knew Adam McKay wanted to be... Oliver Stone(!) a fiery polemic

Rating: 8/10 (24 December 2015)

Yep, this really happened - or at least some of it, some of the time, with celebrities breaking the fourth wall (one of them in a bathtub!) not included - the banks, wall street, mortgage casino-rollers f***ed this country out of lots and lots of money. Trillions of dollars lost, in fact, gone in the air like some fart in the wind. The Big Short could easily have been a documentary, and some of the editing reflect that; this is often cut together in staccato, rapid-fire, sort of floating-over-a-place-and-mind style that one can see in many Oliver Stone movies from the 90's. It's hard not to see it, and one may think it borderlines homage and just ripping-off for the sake of this narrative. But then again this shouldn't necessarily be a story told with subtlety - or, rather, there is already a film that has some fire in its belly but is more subdued, 2011's Margin Call, which is about much of the same material as here but contained in one 24 hour period. The Big Short is an epic story of how a group of people saw that our country was going in a bad, bad direction... and saw to profit from it.
Are guys like Jared Vennett and Michael Burry, MD (can't forget the MD), and Mark Baum guys to root for? That's sort of the provocative point of the movie, and I'm sure was a cornerstone of the book (also from the author of Moneyball, which was also about rigging the system for the favor of the main subjects). The movie goes into further depth about it, but in short: the economy collapsed in 2008 (no s***), but there were signs that there was a housing bubble, in spite of what many economists and the press saw. It was all build on the "sub-prime" mortgages - this is where the joke explanation via bathtub comes in, but one should be able to get the gist without it - basically they were crap mortgages given to people who couldn't afford to pay per month. And it wasn't just one or two or ten, it was thousands bundled together, all these homes put together. So what did people like Burry and Baum, who had investors for their company, decide to do after some investigating into the numbers? Bet against the system - put up 'shorts' so that, if/when the sub-primes went bad, they'd reap the benefits in millions - billions, really.
In a sense it's like watching the lessor of the evils of the finance world. These guys work in high finance and the world of stocks, but they aren't exactly stockbrokers (Brad Pitt's character, who advises two young hedge-fund wannabe-richers, is out of the stock game and more into fresh seeds, a slightly underwritten character but Pitt's presence makes up for it somewhat). They were on the outside and maybe, kind of, sort of, had a conscience about it near the end. While watching the trailer one may think Christian Bale is the main character - certainly the qurkiest with his "Super-Cuts haircut and no shoes" as one of his colleagues observes, it's really an ensemble, with Baum given, to me, the most depth of anyone.
To be sure, Carell is acting his head off here, but he's given a juicy part to play; it's the opposite of the inert, super-weird DuPont from Foxcatcher, as he is fiery, mouthy, ready to complain and speak without any filter. He's also racked by grief from a dead brother who he feels guilt about not saving, and keeps going with his plot to make these credit-default swaps (basically a gamble on the mortgages not working out), and the s*** gets deeper once it gets into those dreaded things called CDO's. It helps that we get to see a character like Baum, and to an extent Berry (though he sort of fades as a smaller presence in the second half of the story), because McKay's style as a director is super kinetic and rapid-fire charged. Almost, one could say, too much.
This is editing that is hyper and bouncing off into different cross-sections; a character may talk about something in the world and McKay and his editors show it, briefly, or maybe more, or we see other things going on in a room in flashes. Like Stone, he's going full-hog into showing the way a mind may bounce around and sort of stream-of-conscious about a place or theme. Other times he can calm down enough to just keep it on the actors, but there's still a nervous energy to how he's keeping the shots, things moving about from one angle to another, the hand-held and the zooms moving about to such a rhythm that is not sloppy (I should hope anyway after so many films under his belt, albeit comedies up till now). It kept me on edge, but that's the right choice for this material; it's angering and heart-breaking and, unless you've lived under a rock for the past ten years, know that things went seriously, seriously wrong just across the board from banks to Lehman and Goldman and (come on!) rating agencies and the government.
It may be looked at as manipulative just by how it frames its messages. I don't even know if it'll be a film I'll revisit more than once or twice because of the intense emotions and thoughts it brought back to me. But it's an important film all the same, and that it contains some excellent work from Carell and Bale, and some serviceable stuff from Gosling and Pitt and a few others, makes it worth seeing. Just decide over the Christmas holiday if getting riled up about the financial crash and lots and lots and LOTS of unadalterated greed and presented like a buckshot blast to the solar plexus is your cup of tea.