SAINTS DON'T LIVE ON PARK AVENUE

Rating: 10/10 (20 May 2018)

This is the story of the hedge fund operators who saw the housing bubble collapse coming and profited by betting against it. We have glimpses of the personal lives and idiosyncrasies of the main characters. Michael Burry (Christian Bale) saw it two years before it happened. Mark Baum (Steve Carell) got wind of it from a wrong number and checked it out himself. There were also two men from Boulder who had figured things out separately but needed the help of Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) to pull it off.
The first hurdle was that there was no mechanism to buy a short or swap against the real estate market. Michael Burry had to negotiate them and the investment companies were happy to take his money and party with it as bonds are never down graded.
The film had a number of asides and documentary style interjections. It took the complex task of explaining market terms by using stars and metaphors. For instance Selena Gomez explains synthetic CDOs at a blackjack table, something that even investors didn't know existed, or at least the film portrayed it that way.
Now the folks who made millions on the collapse of the world economy didn't celebrate on screen. They felt bad winning by betting against the little guy who ultimately had to pay with his job and home.
The film feels partially like a documentary. When something didn't really happen "that way" they did an aside to let you know it is a dramatization. And sometimes they did an aside to let you know it really did happen. This film is told from a different point of view then the other films out there, told from the viewpoint of the investment companies.
It was hard not to love the bold character of Steve Carell.
Guide: F-bomb, brief nudity (Mark Baum had to interview a stripper/real estate owner on the job)
The film conclusions point blank disagrees with the conservative line which blamed the people who took out the mortgages and not the banks. (Don't blame me, I'm just the messenger.)