Highly educational distillation of 2007-2008 financial crisis despite non-heroic nature of film's protagonists

Rating: 7/10 (14 January 2016)

Adam McKay, former head writer for Saturday Night Live, co-wrote and directed this black comedy based on the 2010 book of the same name by Michael Lewis, all about how a few quirky finance guys foresaw the looming financial crisis of 2007-2008, and ended up profiting from it.
The main character played by Christian Bale is Michael Burry, a former physician turned hedge fund manager who discovers that the US housing market is unstable due to risky sub-prime loans. He becomes convinced that the financial crisis is unavoidable and creates a "credit default swap market," convincing various banks to accept his "bets" that the housing market will collapse. The banks, convinced that the market is stable, gladly accept his investments on behalf of the investors in his hedge fund.
We find out a little about Burry's background—that he lost an eye as a child. suffers from Asperger's Syndrome, and was always a maverick who didn't fit the typical profile of a hedge fund manager. McKay establishes a conflict between Burry and his jittery investors, who stand to lose millions, if his prediction does not come to fruition. How Burry copes with the pressure is where the comedy comes in— although it's certainly not laugh out loud funny. And it's also quite interesting how Burry ultimately prevents all his investors from panicking and cashing in all their chips—he does this by creating a moratorium on all withdrawals, right before the big economic collapse!
When trader Jared Vennett of Deustche Bank (Ryan Gosling) hears about Burry's credit default swap market, he decides to get in on the action too. Vennett's wrong number phone call alerts our other protagonist, Mark Baum, another quirky, curmudgeonly hedge fund manager adroitly played by Steve Carrell. Baum and Vennett join forces and Baum begins to investigate the depth of the problem with the US Housing market. Baum is a sensitive guy who was deeply affected by his brother who committed suicide. He discovers that collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) are loan packages bundled together and given AAA ratings by unscrupulous rating agencies. McKay wisely takes us out of the finance board rooms and has his principals attend a big housing forum in Las Vegas where Baum in particular meets a fat cat businessman who has profited greatly by creating synthetic CDOs. Baum ultimately convinces his business associates to adopt Burry's stratagem.
Also in the mix are small-time, young investors Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) who learn of the swap market and then must conscript a retired banker, Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt), to get them in the game. Rickert, now a new age type (and one who has a conscience like Baum), castigates Geller and Shipley for celebrating over impending profits, at the expense of the millions of people who will lose their jobs and income due to the financial collapse. Geller and Shipley try to atone for their selfish attitude by attempting to alert the press about the impending collapse, but to no avail.
McKay may see the protagonists here as heroes merely for their foresight into what is to come, and for bearing witness to the fraud they uncovered. Nonetheless, despite their guilty conscience, they ended up profiting from other peoples' misery. Despite their foresight, they're really nothing more than vultures feeding on the carcasses of the millions wiped out in the financial downturn. But it's really the entire financial industry as well as the US government whom McKay is indicting here—a corrupt system that allowed swindlers to convince low-income people to live beyond their means and obtain mortgages that they couldn't possibly pay off.
In the end it's the film's educational value that makes it worthwhile. The 2007-2008 financial collapse is a topic that is difficult to understand. McKay has his characters explain the financial jargon and even brings in celebrities such as Selena Gomez to explain arcane terms that pop up in the narrative. While some of the characters' machinations become somewhat repetitious, I still was able to learn quite a bit about a topic that isn't ordinarily so easy to grasp.