An Inciting and Insightful Movie

Rating: 9/10 (4 January 2016)

American comedy directors/writers have been getting a bad reputation over the last decade. The visual grammar of American comedies has gotten to the point of glorified improv as proved from the yearly Will Ferrell vehicles to Hollywood's insistence that Kevin Hart is a leading man. Adam McKay has certainly been no stranger to such rigmarole and truth be told I have written him off as a comedic dilettante of nearly Todd Phillips-like proportions. The Big Short may not be McKay at his most serious or even at his most ambitious yet there is a alluring mix of humor, pathos and true-story tropes that may have just changed the grammar of both comedy and biography for the better.
The story follows an ensemble cast of middle-to-high-class white guys who caught onto the ambit of the 2008 financial crisis two years before anyone else. Among them is Dr. Michael Burry (Bale) a California hedge fund manager and admitted "outsider" who became the only one who bothered to check the subprime mortgage loan market in- depth. Leading banks at the time were all too happy to sell him credit default swaps on a housing market that has "never" seen a crash. Then Dr. Burry's investing caught the eyes of others including a duo of young money managers Collins and Geller (Wittlock and Magaro) and all independently looked to short the stocks; i.e. bet against the housing market and the American economy as a whole.
If it all sounds complicated, it's because it is. Even the demurring Gosling states this fact in an aside while musing stockbrokers and bankers purposely make it complicated to justify their own position. It's a statement that walks the line between self-evident platitude and mind-boggling absurdity to the point where McKay seems like a laudable choice for director. McKay creates a kaleidoscope of intellectual montage and employs a number of dramatic devices all in the service of a story so ludicrous it must be true. There are asides that boil down the complexities of financial markets into dynamic mini-lessons complete with diagrams and buzz word definitions; there is frenzied footage of news, entertainment and reality TV inter-spliced with the action to create an almost documentary-like pacing and there are even random cameos that are just plain brilliant.
Thematically many would link The Big Short to Wolf of Wall Street (2013) or Boiler Room (2000). Those who do are making a mistake. For while avarice and it's consequences are apparent, the common thread here but stupidity. Stupidity in the face of fraud and lack of foresight. Margin Call (2011) brought an equal amount of scrutiny to the financial markets and the regulators who are supposed to mange them. Yet while pre-dating this film by four years, it wasn't the galvanizing force it should have been. It also wasn't quite as entertaining.
The Big Short is one of the best films of 2015 and arguably the most important movie about the 2008 financial crisis. It is at all points crass, educational, heartfelt, angry, sincere and riotously hilarious. It features great performances by its largely male cast and the mis en scene can be seen as a meta-analysis of how we view not just the Great Recession but movies as well. In the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan stated, "I discovered a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works." As we see now, the world works in an almost tragicomedic way. I suppose we've gotten to the point where we can all laugh about the 8 million American who lost their jobs and the trillions of dollars lost; after all, there comes a point where you have nothing left to do but chuckle.