By Preston Wilder
Sub-prime loans. Treasury bonds. Utility stocks. Collateralised debt obligations. Financial jargon is puzzling, in fact it’s deliberately puzzling says someone in The Big Short – a densely packed, grimly funny semi-comedy that plays like an older, more responsible brother to The Wolf of Wall Street – jargon being a form of obfuscation that allows the banks to operate beyond the ken of ordinary people (including those with money invested in them). ‘How could this have happened?’ is the underlying question as the film shows a country in the grip of financial insanity; ‘How did they get away with it?’. Because those who saw behind the jargon didn’t stop them, is the answer, and those who might’ve stopped them couldn’t see behind the jargon.
Our real-life heroes are Wall Street types, because who else could they be? (Outsiders didn’t even know what was happening.) They’re not Occupy activists looking to bring down the System, they’re capitalists looking to make a buck – but they’re misfit capitalists, either because they’re just starting out, not being taken very seriously, or because they’re a little bit weird. Michael Burry (Christian Bale) is weird, with his tenuous social skills and autistic facility for numbers; “I’ve always been more comfortable alone,” as he puts it. Mark Baum (Steve Carell) is weird, with his poor impulse control and gadfly’s obsession with proving people wrong; when Mark was a child, reveals a flashback, the rabbi complained to his mum that he was “looking for inconsistencies in the Word of God”. As for Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), well, he’s not especially weird – but he’s our narrator, and every story needs a halfway-normal narrator.
All these people are investors or fund managers (there’s also another strand, with two young guys being mentored by a burned-out trader played by Brad Pitt) – and they see what everyone else can’t or won’t see, viz. that America’s housing market is built on a bubble, blown ever bigger by greed and corruption. (Rating agencies keep giving AAA ratings to obviously bad investments because, as an employee explains, if we don’t they’ll just go to Moody’s down the road. Welcome to capitalism.) They decide to play the market by betting ‘short’, i.e. betting that the whole rotten system will collapse – and the banks are all too happy to take that bet, though the film also makes clear that our heroes are in no position to lecture the evil bankers when they themselves stand to make a killing. “It doesn’t make me wrong,” says Baum hotly. “No,” comes the reply, “but it makes you a hypocrite.”
There are two charges one could level against the movie. The first is that it dumbs down, patronising the audience with light-hearted interludes where Selena Gomez or celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain appear (as themselves) to decipher the jargon in layman’s terms – but in fact it’s genuinely helpful when Bourdain explains collateralised debt obligations in terms of a restaurant turning smelly old fish into seafood stew (“It’s not old fish. It’s a whole new thing!”), and besides one can hardly accuse The Big Short of over-simplifying when its mass of intricate detail will undoubtedly prove too much for 99 per cent of the multiplex audience. It’s true there are documentaries (Inside Job, most notably) which have already covered this ground – but it’s one thing watching a documentary and quite another watching Batman and Brick Tamland rail against the System, not to mention Brad Pitt doing his Voice of Conscience routine like in 12 Years a Slave.
The second charge is a simple ‘Who cares?’, at least for a Cypriot audience. Why should we care what happened in America? – but of course we know the US meltdown sparked a global recession, even if we may be unsure how the pieces fit together. The Big Short does admittedly feel like it’s made for domestic consumption (especially when it starts lamenting “an era of fraud in America”, taking in religion and even baseball) – but it’s still entertaining, made by Adam McKay of Anchorman fame. The camera zips around, focus drifts in and out for that faux-documentary feel, people talk to camera and break the fourth wall in general (“OK, this part isn’t totally accurate”), and a cast of assertive men – it’s mostly men – hustle hilariously. “You smell that?… [significant pause] I smell money.”
And of course there’s that jargon, typifying the perfidy of financial types everywhere. “Does it make you feel bored, or stupid?” asks narrator Gosling; “It’s supposed to!”. A final caption reveals that Wall Street, having emerged near-unscathed from the crash of 2008, is starting to return to its old habits, only with new jargon – but things may be changing, a slew of recent think-pieces having pinpointed a shift to the Left in America, a shift of which The Big Short may be part: capitalism is surely in crisis when a comedy writer can raise $30 million in Hollywood money for a two-hour-long anti-money lecture (albeit with jokes). Will it all come crashing down? The Big Short quotes Haruki Murakami: “Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come”.
DIRECTED BY Adam McKay
STARRING Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling
US 2015 130 mins
