THE BIG SHORT – The Review

Making a comedy about a serious subject is a tricky thing. But it has been done – think DR. STRANGELOVE or THE GREAT DICTATOR.  THE BIG SHORT is a dark comedy with biting wit about the real estate bubble and meltdown that triggered the Great Recession. Or at least it is funny to start, until remembering all that greed and misbehavior begins to make you angry all over again.

Many will find THE BIG SHORT a brilliant, intelligent, pointedly funny film. Whether you like “The Big Short” or not might depend on how you feel about those events and the fact that no major figures went to jail. The right-leaning media seems determined to call the film terrible, despite its appearance on many critics’ top-ten lists.

Christian Bale heads up a terrific ensemble cast that includes Steve Carrell, Ryan Gosling, and Brad Pitt. Director Adam McKay adapted the Michael Lewis book of the same name. The film opens with voice-over by Gosling and Michael Burry (Bale), a physician turned investor, uncovering what he thinks is an anomaly in the market, one he can exploit by “shorting” investments that are considered some of the safest, ones backed by home mortgages, long considered rock-solid reliable. Pitt’s character Ben Rickert, a former investor who has dropped out of the rat-race to live out in the woods, is based on Ben Hockett, Gosling portrays Jared Vennett, a character based on the real Gregg Lippman, one of several investors looking into mortgaged-backed securities and discovering the problems that will eventually crash the economy.

Among these high-powered, often eccentric individuals mining financial information for overlooked investment gold are Mark Baum (Carell), somewhat based on the real Steve Eisman. All these guys are strikingly unique but Baum’s foul-mouthed, high-stress character is among the most eccentric, as well as funny. Baum engages in a running back-and-forth with his wife (Marisa Tomei), in which she tells him he should quit his job because he hates it while Baum insists he loves it.

This story requires the use of some technical financial talk, which director McKay handles in a clever way. Margot Robbie soaks in a bubble bath, sipping champagne while explaining sub-prime mortgages, one of several interludes where unlikely celebrities, such as Anthony Bourdain and Selena Gomez, to provide definitions and brief explanations of financial terms. The effect is both humorous and informative, a far better solution than the usual one of stopping the dialog for some exposition by the characters…

The film is fast and funny, switching from person to person. As befits the irrational exuberance that proceeded the crash, the film has a breathless pace and driving energy. Gosling’s voice-over helps us keep track in this rapid-paced, cleverly presented  story that sometimes plays a bit like an action thriller. But the comic tone starts to drop away as these clever people start to realize how far down the rabbit hole this problem goes, the chain of responsibility that runs all the way to the top, and its incendiary potential for the U.S and world economies and people’s individual lives. Coming at all that makes the revelations all the more chilling.

THE BIG SHORT is one of the year’s best films in a year that has seen some other great films about real-world subjects, such as SPOTLIGHT. Human folly and our capacity for short-sightedness as well as greed are major themes in this brilliant, worthy film. THE BIG SHORT starts out with comedy but ends with tragedy for those not in on the secret under the market.

THE BIG SHORT opens in St. Louis on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2015.

OVERALL RATING:  5 OUT OF 5 STARS