REVIEW: THE BIG SHORT
You won't understand The Big Short.
That is, unless you're an insider in the banking business. That's probably not even how you use that phrase. Banking industry? How about super villain headquarters? Yeah, I like that a little better. As we learned from The Wolf of Wall Street (and uh, common sense: how many articles talk about the nice guys of Wall Street?) there are plenty of bankers and investors willing and ready to make a profit at the risk of the 99%. Ryan Gosling's Jared Vennett certainly knows this. He's one of the insiders who saw the 2008 bubble pop, the housing and banking collapse that led to one of the largest recessions in U.S. history. Everyone in this movie is based on real people, based on Michael Lewis' nonfiction book of the same name. But this movie will tell you when it's fibbing on the truth a little: and that's the biggest thing it has going for it.
As I said, laymen to this business are going to have a hard time grappling with the insufferable financial jargon in this picture. I couldn't decipher 90% of what Christian Bale's character was saying, and his performance has stuck with me the most since I left the theater! But the wonderful thing is, (and why this movie probably got made it all because who would care about this subject matter?) is that director Adam McKay (that's right, Mr. Anchorman and Step Brothers himself) realizes this. He realized that making a Hollywood movie about a financial crisis wouldn't appeal to anyone. His product is one of the most meta-pieces of mainstream cinema I've seen in a while. The film is practically framed as a documentary with an extremely well acted film as its core.
And the thing is that none of these characters is particularly likable. Especially Ryan Gosling, who through the meta-narrative device is always talking to you the audience, and even admits near the end that he never was meant to be the "hero." There's no hero. All four of these people (oh there's Brad Pitt too, I'll get to him in a second) knew the bubble was going to burst and purposely profited off of it. Though they were smart, and none of them too cynical about it except for Gosling, their gain meant literally everyone else's loss. They didn't want to be right. Steve Carrell plays Mark Baum, a no-BS straight-shooter New Yorker working through demons of his own and juggling his growing bitterness towards the system he's so deep into. Carrell continues his Oscar-worthy transformative real life person film streak, coming off a haunting performance in Foxcatcher.
I've commented on Gosling's sleazy achievement. Bale probably has the showiest role as Dr. Burry, a manager at a hedge fund (whatever that means) who surely has Aspergers, blasting heavy rock and crunching numbers like Rain Man. While he has this vast intelligence, you feel for the man, who longingly looks at pictures of his family, who hasn't been able to connect with people at all in his life, who's mocked for investing nearly $2 billion for the eventual payoff from the Great Recession. And then there's Brad Pitt, who probably gave himself the part like he put himself in 12 Years a Slave, as a critical but not large role as Ben Rickert. He's got a great, sobering scene with Hamish Linklater and John Magaro, who play two up and comers who also get in on the plan, but I've been waiting since Benjamin Button to see Pitt wow me again.
McKay and Charles Randolph's script shines the brightest in all this talent, which is no easy feat considering the gargantuan star power. Crimson Peak was enjoyable, pre-Halloween fun at the cinemas, but The Big Short might be this year's most frightening horror movie. The narrators (and others who made the movie's surprises so much fun, but I'm not sure how much they'll hold up in the years to come) take turns dishing out the truth of this wicked corruption. And there's no signs of stopping. The film is quickly edited, charmingly intelligent and courteous to the audience it's serving, trying to break down these concepts that the movie says Wall Street makes complicated so we don't ask questions. Thank goodness there's a movie out that questions that authority. The content may have been too dense for me to fully comprehend, but if you even get the gist of what The Big Short is trying to tell you, you'll be furious with our current state of things and content with seeing one of the best acted movies this year.
Rating: 3/4 stars
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| "Stop calling me Michael Scott!" |
As I said, laymen to this business are going to have a hard time grappling with the insufferable financial jargon in this picture. I couldn't decipher 90% of what Christian Bale's character was saying, and his performance has stuck with me the most since I left the theater! But the wonderful thing is, (and why this movie probably got made it all because who would care about this subject matter?) is that director Adam McKay (that's right, Mr. Anchorman and Step Brothers himself) realizes this. He realized that making a Hollywood movie about a financial crisis wouldn't appeal to anyone. His product is one of the most meta-pieces of mainstream cinema I've seen in a while. The film is practically framed as a documentary with an extremely well acted film as its core.
And the thing is that none of these characters is particularly likable. Especially Ryan Gosling, who through the meta-narrative device is always talking to you the audience, and even admits near the end that he never was meant to be the "hero." There's no hero. All four of these people (oh there's Brad Pitt too, I'll get to him in a second) knew the bubble was going to burst and purposely profited off of it. Though they were smart, and none of them too cynical about it except for Gosling, their gain meant literally everyone else's loss. They didn't want to be right. Steve Carrell plays Mark Baum, a no-BS straight-shooter New Yorker working through demons of his own and juggling his growing bitterness towards the system he's so deep into. Carrell continues his Oscar-worthy transformative real life person film streak, coming off a haunting performance in Foxcatcher.
I've commented on Gosling's sleazy achievement. Bale probably has the showiest role as Dr. Burry, a manager at a hedge fund (whatever that means) who surely has Aspergers, blasting heavy rock and crunching numbers like Rain Man. While he has this vast intelligence, you feel for the man, who longingly looks at pictures of his family, who hasn't been able to connect with people at all in his life, who's mocked for investing nearly $2 billion for the eventual payoff from the Great Recession. And then there's Brad Pitt, who probably gave himself the part like he put himself in 12 Years a Slave, as a critical but not large role as Ben Rickert. He's got a great, sobering scene with Hamish Linklater and John Magaro, who play two up and comers who also get in on the plan, but I've been waiting since Benjamin Button to see Pitt wow me again.McKay and Charles Randolph's script shines the brightest in all this talent, which is no easy feat considering the gargantuan star power. Crimson Peak was enjoyable, pre-Halloween fun at the cinemas, but The Big Short might be this year's most frightening horror movie. The narrators (and others who made the movie's surprises so much fun, but I'm not sure how much they'll hold up in the years to come) take turns dishing out the truth of this wicked corruption. And there's no signs of stopping. The film is quickly edited, charmingly intelligent and courteous to the audience it's serving, trying to break down these concepts that the movie says Wall Street makes complicated so we don't ask questions. Thank goodness there's a movie out that questions that authority. The content may have been too dense for me to fully comprehend, but if you even get the gist of what The Big Short is trying to tell you, you'll be furious with our current state of things and content with seeing one of the best acted movies this year.
Rating: 3/4 stars
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