The answer, at least for the producers of The Big Short, is to hire the most unlikely of directors, Adam McKay, whose résumé features nothing but Will Ferrell vehicles like Anchorman (2004), Talladega Nights (2006), and The Other Guys (2010); assemble an impressive cast of movie stars and Oscar winners like Christian Bale, Steve Carrell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt (who also co-produced), Melissa Leo, and Marisa Tomei; and then throw everything but the kitchen sink into the works (well, a kitchen sink actually does make an appearance when celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain takes the screen for a few minutes to explain in laymen’s terms what a collateralized debt obligation (CDO) is, but we’ll get to that shortly). And wouldn’t you know the whole unwieldy thing actually works.

The story is narrated by Jared Bennett (Ryan Gosling), a slick Wall Street trader who got in on the action when he learned that Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a oddball neurosurgeon-turned-hedge fund manager had crunched numbers and determined that the entire U.S. housing market was going to collapse in a few years due to its increasing reliance on CDOs, which were packaging subprime mortgages (“dogshit” in the vulgar parlance of the traders) and selling them like solid, low-risk investments (or something like that). (Burry, by the way, whose Asperger’s Syndrome explains his social awkwardness and penchant for odd behaviors like a refusal to wear shoes and drumming to heavy metal music while working, is the only character in the film who bears the same name as his real-life counterpart; all the other characters have been fictionalized or at least had their names changed.) Others who follow Burry’s lead include Mark Baum (Steve Carell), another hedge fund manager who doesn’t manage his anger as well as he does his funds, and investors Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock), who have recently started their own fund out of their garage and are looking to break into the big time. To do that, they work with Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt), a former trader in self-imposed retirement who is trying to escape the system that he sees as corrupt. Ben is not alone in that assessment, as much of Baum’s anger is directed at the very system within which he works and the way it constantly benefits the rich and powerful at the expense of the average wage earner just trying to make a living.

We all know that, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars these guys made by buying up credit default swaps (essentially betting that the system would fail, the “big short” of the title), we know that the story does not have a happy ending: the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression that led to a four-year global recession, financial losses in the trillions, and more than a million Americans losing their homes, that most cherished symbol of having “made it.” A number of other films have been set against the financial collapse, including J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call (2011) and Ramin Bahrani’s 99 Homes (2015), as well as a host of outraged documentaries, but The Big Short does something unique in trying to dramatize the collapse itself and what led to it, rather than using it as a backdrop for character drama.

This approach has its price, though, as the heavy emphasis on the mechanics of the system and how they were destined to break down in a major way comes at the expense of the characters, who are etched just well enough to make an impression, but not so much that they emerge as much more than cogs in the machine. Carell stand out of the most if only because his character plays the role of the film’s outraged moral voice, railing with the anger of the millions who got shafted about the inequities of a system that rewards failure and pays those rewards off the backs of hard-working Americans whose only sin was investing in a system they thought was valid. Bale has some good moments playing up Burry’s eccentricities, but he is most important as the film’s spark, the character who sees the light and takes the first risk. Other characters have even less impact, including Pitt’s Ben Rickert, whose lack of charisma and woodenness is supposed to convey his sense of defeat in the shadow of Wall Street but instead comes across as just, well, wooden.

McKay understands these risks, and he and co-screenwriter Charles Randolph try to make up for it by making The Big Short as fast and furious as they can. Far from McKay’s unassuming direction in his Will Ferrell comedies, he structures The Big Short around shaky camerawork, sudden zooms, rapid-fire montages, and a pounding soundtrack of pop and rock hits that keep the film’s pulse high, even when the characters are discussing economic principles that most of us will never fully understand. Some of the film’s best moments are when McKay seeks to put a human face on the crisis, particularly in a series of scenes in which Baum and his partners travel to Florida to view the collapsing housing market firsthand. They find dozens of empty homes, a renter who is shocked to find that his landlord took out a subprime mortgage under his dog’s name, a pair of slimy, arrogant mortgage brokers who care about nothing as long as they get their cut, and a literal alligator swimming in a pool.

McKay also employs a few truly risky devices, including breaking the fourth wall (Gosling regularly breaks from the action and speaks directly to us in addition to explaining things via voice-over narration), and three times he brings in celebrities playing themselves to explain complex financial terms in a way that we can grasp on a very basic level (hence the aforementioned appearance of Anthony Bourdain, although I won’t mention the other ones since part of the pleasure is the surprise of who suddenly shows up). Aesthetically, The Big Short feels like something of a hodge-podge, but that’s the intended effect, as we are supposed to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the financial markets and the myriad ways they manipulate money to their own ends. Like all such stories, it ends on a note of indignation, as the criminals who sent the system down the tubes got off scot free, while 1.2 million Americans lost their homes and lots more lost their savings. If the root of all evil is truly the love of money, then The Big Short is the ultimate romance.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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