Complicated, scary, powerful, compelling

Rating: Null/10 (24 January 2016)

There are many ways that movies can tell the story of financial markets - but they are all complicated and they are all scary. While "Margin Call" (2011) was very tight and very serious, "The Wolf Of Wall Street" (2013) was a sprawling comedy. "The Big Short" - which examines how the sub-prime mortgage scandal brought about the financial collapse of 2007-2008 - is somewhere in between.
It tells a particular story, based on the Michael Lewis book "The Big Short: Inside The Doomsday Machine", but it uses a whole variety of techniques to make the complex terminology understandable and entertaining: a documentary style, flashy camera-work, text on screen, straight-to-camera dialogue, and bizarre cameos set in a bath tub, a kitchen, and a casino.
It works thanks to the skill of co-writer and director Adam McKay and a good deal of fine acting with the best-known faces being Steve Carell and Christian Bale, who are both terrific, and Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt, who are both excellent. But it is a terribly male film with all the female characters being small parts as wives, regulators or strippers. The talented Marisa Tomei is wholly underused. A leading female personage from the book, Meredith Whitney, is not even mentioned.
Also it is an odd movie because the viewer kind of wants the the three groups of lead characters - the ones attempting to 'short' the market - to be proved right, but that means that Wall Street is corrupt, the regulators are asleep, and millions of citizens are going to suffer.
This is powerful and compelling cinema and the bits of text that conclude the film are utterly chilling. They include the observation:
"Five trillion dollars in pensions, real estate, savings and bonds disappeared. Eight million people lost their jobs and six million their homes. And that was just the USA. Banks took the money the American people gave them, used it to pay themselves huge bonuses, lobbied Congress to kill big reform, then blamed immigrants and poor people. And only one single banker went to jail. Some poor schmuck from Credit Suisse."