Vigorous as The Wolf of Wall Street, depressing as Margin Call

Rating: 8/10 (2 March 2016)

Like i said in my review of Spotlight, there are two kinds of movies that are inherently American: courthouse drama and journalism one. I guess i have missed the third kind: a Wall Street money porn. Yeah, it's not just drama, because in each of these films someone gets screwed so hard it's sometimes scary.
Since Wall Street (1987), we're being told the stories about greed, ambition and moral flexibility that have a permanent residence at that part of NYC. Some stories are more light-hearted, some are of a gloomy kind. But all of them are quite exciting to watch if made right. And since The Wolf of Wall Street was such a big hit, i guess someone has decided that maybe the darkest page in the history of US economy of at least the last 50 years could be given a similar presentation. In fact, The Big Short's intro and Ryan Gosling's opening monologue were such a direct reference to the Scorsese film that it almost felt like a blatant rip-off. So when Margot Robbie made her cameo as a stunning blonde drinking champagne while taking a bath with a seaside view, i was hardly surprised at all.
Still, The Big Short is not just a dark comedy about the '08 economic crisis. In fact, it's hardly a comedy at all. It tries to lighten the moods with some witty gags or episodic hilariousness, but it doesn't really conceal how depressing, sad and wrong the main topic of the film is. Steve Carell's character is the best reflection of we are left to experience: if at first he's just angry and fuming and yelling at people, then at the end all he can do is sit all bent and silent. And that's a guy who got $200 million out of this big scam, now imagine how a regular homeowner who's been thrown out on the street for being late on his insanely overpriced mortgage must have felt.
Despite being a truly dramatic and emotional movie about a very important moment in our history, The Big Short is not without a flaw. I guess some stories are just too overwhelming to take them on from all the angles at the same time. Not only did The Big Short try to recreate the timeline of that crisis and show us the stories of several people, each with their own hard life paths that had much more tragedy than Wall Street could be responsible for, but it also tried its best to educate people and give them the basics of the financial competence. A noble endeavor, but the gap between an encyclopedic and a fictionalized approach is too big for a film to be comfortable trying to embrace them both at the same time. Which, despite all the film's efforts to be as simple and clear as possible, leaves the audience kinda numb and dumbfounded, with the only thought left being "thank god it's over". Both the crisis and the story. Since most of the real-life prototypes of the main movie characters quit the financial industry, they probably felt the same way too: it was good while it lasted, but now let's move on to something more pleasant.