A Great Movie, But More Importantly Does A Great Job Explaining A Complicated Subject We Could All Stand To Know More About

Rating: 9/10 (15 January 2016)

With all the media coverage of the collapse of the U.S. housing market in 2008, anyone who hasn't read the book The Big Short or have an intimate knowledge of the finer details of this event might be dismissive of this movie. It's understandable but it's unfortunate nonetheless. What we were presented with from the media may or may not have been completely accurate, having been filtered through a scope. We need more stories like the ones that are presented here, to help the public grasp what happened and as the film points out, how easily it could happen again.
*Minor Spoilers Ahead* Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) serves as the narrator but we don't actually get to meet his character until later in the feature. He introduces us to what the banking industry used to be in the 1980s, a boring job with an uninteresting salary. Then traders of Salomon brothers changed that by creating mortgage bonds that pooled thousands of mortgages together to create a mortgage backed security. It revolutionized the banking industry and helped banking become one of the most profitable if not the most profitable sector of the American economy and eventually was the primary cause of the 2008 collapse. But as Jared tells us there were a few people who saw this coming and even though they were ostracized and laughed at by the industry leaders, they were eventually proved correct and in the process made millions of dollars off of what would be a horrifying experience for millions of ordinary citizens of the developed world.
The Big Short largely centres around 5 characters. Dr Michael Burry (Christian Bale) an eccentric west coast hedge fund manager, Jared Vennett a sleazy trader employed by Deustche Bank who primarily peddles the credit default swaps to financial big wigs, Mark Baum (Steve Carell) may be the most bearish Wall Street hedge fund manager you would come across who runs a fund that is involved with Morgan Stanley, and Charlie Geller (John Margaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Whitrock) two investors who happen upon Vennett's material on how profitable these swaps could be and decide to do everything they can to get involved. Being an ensemble piece, it's hard to attach yourself to every character that gets a chunk of the screen time but one of the things The Big Short accomplishes is that you get to know all these characters and you get involved in what they're caught up in. They all have distinct personalities (Vennett describes the rest of the main cast as freaks) and are all interesting. You can relate to their struggle even though you're not the one gambling with giant sums of money. We know what's going to happen, we all lived through it in some capacity but I found it more and more gripping as the movie went along and I wanted to know what happened to these people after they finally were exonerated.
When I described the characters up above, if you didn't know anything about the tale you might think I was describing a thriller. Thankfully, this is not what the film is. Another feat of the movie is how well the movie balances both the comedic and dramatic aspects of the story. I was laughing really hard at points and I was ready to cry at others but it all fits together pretty organically. Helping this along is the celebrity cameos that appear intermittently and while I don't want to spoil too much about them, they are interesting and surprisingly informative. They help take deliberately confusing concepts and boil it down into something we can understand. To be fair though, you still might not pick up everything that's going on but in terms of things being identifiable, this is probably as close as you're going to get.
The acting is award worthy by some and at least satisfactory by all. I thought Steve Carell did the best job as Baum, his character is the closest you get to a moral centre in both the book and the movie and while even though he's not losing his job or his home, like his wife points out, you feel the pain and anger of this crisis through his performance. Christian Bale delivers in fine form as Dr. Mike Burry, throwing his all into it. Ryan Gosling had to stretch the least (in terms of his appearance) in his part but that's offset by how funny he is and how he does such a good job at playing a morally loose dirt bag. Keep an eye out for Brad Pitt in a small role but he nails it as well.
The Big Short has great witty dialogue, awards calibre acting, and a message that needs to be taught which they do in an interesting way. My one complaint is that the movie is filmed in a very scatter-shot way and it took me a little while to get used to it but by the halfway point it wasn't a problem any more. Be prepared, the movie is a lot of fun but the ending is a sucker punch to the gut and you will leave ready to bawl or ready to smash something. What happened in 2008 was terrible and as the movie reminds us where these executives got their golden parachutes and avoided jail time (which they frankly deserved), it was the rest of us that had to deal with the mess and the ending doesn't pull punches about that. I was entertained throughout and I can't recommend it highly enough. It would make a great double feature with the fantastic documentary Inside Job, if you're looking to learn a little more about what really went down with the World economic collapse in 2008.