Well-made black comedy for adults about a tough topic

Rating: 8/10 (10 January 2016)

This film assumes of the audience that we are old enough to know what bonds and mortgages are, that bonds are rated on a letter system, and what a FICO score is. If you have this level of basic knowledge going in, you will have no problem following the film's clever and entertaining explanations of CDO's, CDS's, synthetic mortgage bonds etc.
This is not a madcap caper. It's a sobering look at how mass stupidity, self-delusion, and greed resulted in the crash of 2008. I read Michael Lewis's book and I was curious to know how it would be translated into a film. Lewis's book points out the role of the Federal Government in loosening lending requirements and in abolishing Glass Steagall; the film doesn't touch that aspect of the story. Instead it focuses on the obsessive outsiders who actually read the contents of the mortgage bonds and couldn't believe what they saw.The ensemble cast is excellent, and the various threads are drawn together expertly toward the looming disaster. The metaphorical relationships and settings equate American capitalism with gambling in Las Vegas. The house always wins and the losers are the average chumps.
The film subverts the satisfactions of the "heist" genre because the victory of the "heroes" (Burry, Baum etc.) comes at great cost to everyone else, even though there is satisfaction in seeing these prophets in the wilderness vindicated. Ultimately, this movie is about how difficult socially and financially it can be to tell the truth, even when it's in plain sight.
If you lived in New York or in Florida at that time, you will chuckle at the evocation of the bubble period (not that long ago but it seems like a million years ago).