"The Big Short" does a very good job overcoming a high degree of difficulty to tell a very important story.

Rating: 7/10 (28 December 2015)

Because of the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2009 "The U.S. entered a deep recession, with nearly 9 million jobs lost during 2008 and 2009 U.S. housing prices fell nearly 30% on average and the U.S. stock market fell approximately 50% by early 2009... The stock market recovered to its pre-crisis peak but housing prices remained near their low point and unemployment remained elevated." That was Wikipedia, not me. When I research the historical background of a movie based on a true story, I look at multiple sources, gain a working knowledge of the topic, summarize that knowledge early in my review and use what I've learned to help me write the rest of the review and evaluate the film. Not this time. I'm no financial expert. The best I can do is pick out what seems to be the most appropriate quote that I ran across in my research and encourage other people who, like me, have very limited financial knowledge to study up a bit before seeing "The Big Short" (R, 2:10).
Much of that first paragraph talks about the results of the Great Recession, but this story is about the few who saw it coming and profited from that knowledge. The central character is Michael Burry (Christian Bale), an ex-neurologist who became a savant-like hedge fund manager. Looking where he says no one else was willing to look, he came to the conclusion that the housing boom of the early 2000s was actually a housing bubble that was getting ready to burst. He became convinced that the large amount of subprime and adjustable rate mortgages would cause a collapse in the housing market in the second quarter of 2007 and he bet that he was right. Burry used his personal investment capital, and that of his fund's investors, to buy credit swaps from the big banks. This basically amounted to an insurance policy against bundled mortgage funds which would only pay off if the market collapsed. Reasoning that the housing market was "rock solid" and that people always pay their mortgages, financial managers were more than happy to take his money – and laugh all the way to their banks.
The problem for those banks – and homeowners across the country – was that Burry was right, although only a small number of people realized it at the time. Burry had to weather severe storms of investor discontent in an effort to hold the credit swaps long enough to profit. As Burry shopped his idea around town, what he was doing became public knowledge. Most people were as perplexed and/or amused that Burry was shorting the housing market as those bankers who sold him those credit swaps, but some were intrigued enough to look into the situation for themselves. Among them was fund manager Mark Baum (played by Steve Carell and based on real-life fund manager Steve Eisman). "Mark" set his team at FrontPoint Partners LLC (a unit of Morgan Stanley) to digging deep into the housing market – on paper and in person, so they could decide how to proceed. This puts them in business with investor Jared Vennett (played by Ryan Gosling and based on real-life investor Greg Lippmann), a man whose honesty is brought into question more than once during the movie. Two others who catch wind of Burry's scheme are talented and hungry young fund managers Jamie Shipley (based on Jamie Mai and played by Finn Wittrock) and Charlie Geller (based on Charlie Ledley and played by John Magaro) who bring in retired banker Ben Rickert (based on Ben Hockett and played by Brad Pitt) to help them navigate these treacherous financial waters. In short, "The Big Short" is about the people who arrived at the same conclusion about the weak U.S. housing market, what else they learned and what they did about it.
This film does as well as could be expected in making its subject matter understandable and compelling and may even be said to exceed expectations. Directed and co-written by comedy writer/director Adam McKay (who only got the job after agreeing to do the second "Anchorman" movie) and based on Michael Lewis' 2010 book, "The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine", this film simplifies and explains things fairly well without dumbing down its subject matter or sacrificing the points it wants to make. Sometimes McKay's actors break "the fourth wall" and talk directly to the camera, while other times celebrities like Margot Robbie, Selena Gomez and Anthony Bourdain show up to take us through object lessons of complex concepts. For the most part, it works. Strong acting from several previous Oscar winners and/or nominees also helps make the plot understandable and lends gravitas to the story. Handicapping the film's entertainment value, there are no heroes in this movie, which boils down to greedy people profiting from other greedy people who took advantage of unwise people. However, the film brings to a mass audience important lessons that we all need to understand on some level. "The Big Short" gets credit for that and for very nearly overcoming its topic's very high degree of difficulty. "B+"