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There is a moment in "The Big Short" that sums up everything that's right with the movie and wrong about America.
The scene is, appropriately enough for a movie about Wall Street, in a Las Vegas casino. It's 2006, and two upstart financial traders, Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) and Charlie Geller (John Magaro), have just left a meeting of mortgage-security specialists — and realized that those "specialists" don't have a clue that the housing market on which their financial instruments depend is a house of cards about to topple.
Jamie and Charlie, who see this housing "bubble" and have invested in such a way that they will gain millions when it bursts, are celebrating. But their adviser and backer, a jaded former Wall Street big wheel named Ben Rickert (played by Brad Pitt), quickly brings them down to earth. Their gain, Rickert tells them, is the nation's loss — with people losing their homes, their jobs and even their lives.
That's the hard pill that director Adam McKay ("Anchorman") makes his audience swallow in "The Big Short." In this true story of a few investment mavericks who bucked the conventional wisdom of Alan Greenspan and the rest of Wall Street to bet against the U.S. economy, McKay has us rooting for these underdog wheeler-dealers who outsmarted the experts until we realize that for the underdogs to win, you and I — and all of America — have to lose.
In this telling, adapted by McKay and co-screenwriter Charles Randolph ("Love and Other Drugs") from Michael Lewis' best-selling book, the first guy to notice something amiss in the go-go economy of 2005 is Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a number-crunching hedge-fund manager in San Jose. Burry sees a pattern nobody else notices: The mortgage-backed securities that are traded like stocks often are based on shaky mortgages, and if those mortgages go into default, the whole market could collapse.
Someone else noticing the same thing is Mark Baum (Steve Carell), who runs a hedge fund within the megafirm Morgan Stanley. Egged on by Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), a trader at Deutsche Bank, Baum and his team do their own digging and figure out that not only are the mortgage-backed securities riskier than advertised, but the worst of the worst are being repackaged as "collateralized debt obligations," or CDOs. (In one of the film's clever asides, McKay has celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain compare the processing of bad mortgage securities into CDOs to turning 3-day-old fish into seafood stew.)
In this fictionalized account (except for Burry, every major player in Lewis' book underwent a name change in the script), McKay and Randolph plow through a lot of dense financial information in breezy, entertaining fashion. They bust open the industry gobbledygook for what it is: a way for Wall Street traders to justify their fees and cover up their mistakes and/or crimes.
The film also pokes at the players who let this casino attitude fester, from the toothless federal regulators to the ratings services that gave overly rosy assessments of the suspect securities. The latter is represented by a Standard & Poor's assessor (Melissa Leo) who, in one of McKay's less subtle digs, is literally wearing blinders.
The solid ensemble cast captures the cynicism of these against-the-grain financial wizards. Best of all is Carell, who portrays Baum as a jaded humanitarian of sorts, looking to short the market not just for his own gain but to remind Wall Street's high fliers of the cost of their hubris.
McKay has designed "The Big Short" to make audiences angry about the unchecked greed and stupidity of the business interests that run this country. He succeeds by using the one tool investigative journalists and crusading politicians don't have at their disposal: withering satire.
Twitter: @moviecricket —
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'The Big Short'
In this true story of maverick traders betting against the economy, director Adam McKay uses satire to disguise white-hot anger at Wall Street's greed.
Where • Theaters everywhere.
When • Opens Wednesday, Dec. 23.
Rating • R for pervasive language and some sexuality/nudity.
Running time • 130 minutes.