Modern horror

Rating: 8/10 (11 July 2016)

The Big Short is about the great collapse of the American housing market (and subsequently the world economy), and as such doesn't appear to fit the mold of a scary movie. But scary it is, particularly for those folks who lost their jobs, savings, and homes as a result. Odds are pretty good that you or someone you know was directly affected by this avoidable catastrophe.
The movie focuses on a few Wall Street guys who figured out years in advance that the housing bubble was going to burst. In the movie, their names are Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), Michael Burry (Christian Bale), Mark Baum (Steve Carell), Charlie Geller (John Magaro), and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock). The script, by director Adam McKay and Charles Randolph, changes the names and some relatively minor details, but everything's based on fact. And since we know how it all turned out (hint: there was a collapse), there isn't much suspense left.
And yet the movie succeeds. The casting is great, for one thing – check out Carell as a broker with a strong moral center and some serious anger-management issues. His is a role ripe for overacting, but Carell never goes overboard, doing a perfect slow, slow, slow burn as he grills various money managers about their methods, which aren't pretty.
There's also humor, a flavor that's desperately needed when dealing with a real-life tale of misery, don't you think? Injecting a little humor into the situation makes the characters look, well, more like human beings than fine-suited Wall Street fellas. That's not to say that there are no poignant moments: one scene in particular involves Carell's Mark Baum and his wife, played by the always-terrific Marisa Tomei. Finally, several of the characters break the proverbial fourth wall, addressing the audience with asides – some of which involve disclaimers about what exactly in the present scene is 100% true and what's been tweaked a little bit. Believe me, it works.
And if that weren't enough to keep the movie wildly entertaining, the script takes time to explain certain relevant financial terms to its audience without being boring or dreary. Terms like CDO, explained by master chef Anthony Bourdain (comparing a CDO to fish that remained unsold at his restaurant at the end of the day), or derivatives, explained by pop star Selena Gomez and economist Richard Thaler. It felt weird understand what they were talking about.
But here's the scariest part of it all. The viewer spends a couple of hours following this sordid tale. We see the bad guys, we see the good guys, and we know that if this were fiction, the bad guys would probably get theirs in the end. But it's not, and we know they don't. We know that despite the canary-in-the-mine behavior of these guys, millions of people lost their jobs. And really, none of them were the movers and shakers on Wall Street. That's because when the big banks had bad mortgages that were in danger of defaulting, they packaged them up and sold them to someone else, who did the same thing to someone else, all the way down the line. The poor sap left holding the bag when the bubble burst lost it all, and those who instigated it lost zilch. That's the terrifying part. All of this in concert between Wall Street, its private-sector overseers, the government, and Big Business. They raked in the dough by breaking the law and, even when caught, suffered few consequences themselves. Which makes The Big Short ten times more horrifying than any gorefest movie I've seen.