Adi’s TL;DR The real wolves of wall street!
Sahil’s TL;DR Financial crisis documentary gets a makeover Ocean’s Eleven style!
Inception, Interstellar, The Martian – they’ve got nothing on The Big Short. Congratulations, you’ve survived the most complicated film of all times, which is not a documentary 🙂 The one that does not deal with a dystopic universe or the math behind surviving on Mars or creating psychedelic dream sequences. It’s the one that deals with the biggest financial crisis in recent times that brought global economy to a scary point, but honestly didn’t change much post the bail-out using taxpayer’s money. It’s that point in recent human history that a lot of people allude to in smart sounding money conversations, but very few really understand! The Big Short attempts to illustrate the collapse of the US real estate market, in an interesting, innovative way, with sufficient spurts of entertaining moments to not completely overwhelm you with the inexplicable jargon.
Here’s some dope on The Big Short. Directed by Adam McKay, yes the same person who gave us Anchorman and Step Brothers, this one is based on a nonfiction book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis. McKay co-wrote The Big Short along with screenwriter Charles Randolph. It was released towards the end of 2015 and has had a successful run at the box office, specially for a film that complex! The film has a very interesting cast, with some unlikely names coming together with Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and even a ‘cameo-ish’ performance by Brad Pitt, who also happens to be one of the producers on the film. Guess, he wanted in on the action too 😉 The Big Short’s been the critics favorite going into this awards season and has five Academy nominations to its name including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor (Christian Bale). As far as Oscars success goes, the film has two critical things going for it – 1) It’s a true story and 2) It’s based on a book! Both of which really help in getting awards, it seems 😉
The Big Short is your Oscar nomination for sheer style. The film is an exercise in innovative filmmaking, for which it should be included in film school curriculums as prescriptive material. If you are a film student or an aspiring filmmaker, The Big Short is a must watch for you. The one most used technique in the film is ‘breaking the fourth wall’, something that happens in theatre a whole lot and even on TV, especially sitcoms from the 90s, used it a fair bit. Breaking the fourth wall, simply put, is when a performer speaks directly to the audience ignoring the fictional set up they’re in. This technique is often used to introduce the narratorial voice, to explain what’s going on or give a back story. These tiny pauses throughout The Big Short is where the film drops any pretense of being ‘real’ and reminds the viewers that it’s a fictionalised story being told by actors who are playing these parts. These are the little windows in which all pieces of this puzzle are put together, mostly by Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), who’s the narrator. McKay also brings an array of celebrities ranging from Anthony Bourdain to Margot Robbie (in a bathtub!) to Selena Gomez (at a poker table) who explain the really technical aspects of the banking and finance world by using somewhat simplified analogies. It starts feeling a bit like a day in school, where multiple teachers come and talk about different subjects. Teaching the audience something about the economic crisis of 2008 is the focus of The Big Short and not a byproduct. McKay may have gone a little far in using this technique in the film, as it begins to irritate a little by constantly breaking the flow. But hey, to each his/her own!
The Big Short is based on a nonfiction book, which takes care of most of the research, but creates an altogether different problem of turning facts to a cinematic story. McKay and Randolph do a great job of bringing this story to life through acting and dialogue, ensuring that it still remains entertaining, while also being educational. The film maintains a dramatic but humorous tone which makes it a fun watch overall. They could have chosen to talk about the economic crisis from the POV of those who lost their jobs and homes, or from the POV of the banks, but instead chose a third unexplored perspective, one of the few who benefited from the crisis. They took four independent stories, running parallel to each other, where people come to the same conclusion – that this is going to be the economic ‘armageddon’. It employs some of the tropes associated with heist films, like a group of unlikely people, profiteering in a rather shady way, taking away from those who have in abundance and being really cool along the way! We were reminded of these famous lines from Gone with the Wind, that Rhett Butler says to Scarlett O’Hara, ‘I told you once before that there were two times for making big money, one in the up-building of a country and the other in its destruction. Slow money on the up-building, fast money in the crack-up. Remember my words. Perhaps they may be of use to you some day.’ Rhett’s words were of use to a few many decades later.
The Big Short tells its story through four parallel narratives. each from the perspective of men who did something that no one else did, they ‘looked’. Dr. Michael Burry (played by Christian Bale), a neurologist turned hedge fund manager is the one to foresee the impending fall of the housing market. He is a geek, an introvert whose awkward af in all social interactions and has an obsession with heavy metal (music). If only, they would share his playlist! We never see him leave his office, where he lives and brushes and interviews new candidates in his shorts. That’s just our idea of a really cool boss! Christian Bale is phenomenal as Dr. Burry. He is eccentric, quirky and not easy to like, but a genius who knows he’s one. He is the first one to bet against the housing market, against popular opinion. Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), apart from being the narrator, is also the one to piece together other implications of ‘shorting’ (jargon) the housing market and finds the truth about CDO’s (more jargon), which in turn becomes his big opportunity to make money. He’s slick, sexy, the wall streeter we’ve all seen in The Wolf of Wall Street, who you just can’t trust.
Mark Baum (played by Steve Carell) is the third important piece of this puzzle. Mark is angry with the world. Very angry. He is a middle tier hedge fund manager whose personal loss has left him disillusioned with everyone and everything. Vennett unknowingly tips off Mark’s team, who begin their own truth finding mission to discover how deep and wide the scam of sub-prime mortgages and bonds (even more jargon) runs. Mark has some of the most hilarious scenes in the film and would be a tragi-comic character in Shakespeare’s world. He is as much a ‘character’ as Dr. Burry and has his own eccentricities and quirks, that make him just as difficult to be socially accepted. The fourth story and perhaps the weakest is that of two upcoming brokers – Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock), who seek advice from Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) an ex-banker, who becomes their mentor and trader. In a really cool scene, we see Charlie and Jamie waiting at the JP Morgan Chase office, where they find Vennett’s brochure lying around in the lobby and immediately break the fourth wall to tell us that’s not how it happened in real life and this is only for the purpose of the film! Each of these characters represent personality stereotypes from the nerd, to the vigilante, to the opportunist to the wide eyed kids and you miss seeing flawed, well rounded characters that are just as human.
Here’s the ‘one stand out moment’ for each of us. And for a change we picked just one! There are a whole bunch of punchlines and meaningful scenes in The Big Short, from Vennett exclaiming that Mark is about to have a coronary sitting in the restaurant to the stripper telling Mark about her ‘five houses and a condo’! But the one that made us laugh the hardest was another Mark Baum scene, with his ‘numbers guy’ Vinny who tells him that the risk assessors are waiting for him. Mark asks Vinny to ‘go back in and very calmly, very politely, tell the risk assessors to fuck off’. Vinny true to his character, goes in the room, politely and calmly and says ‘Mark said to fuck off’! And leaves without another word, leaving everyone looking agape.
The Big Short is an innovative, stylized film that does justice to the subject it took. It gets points for technique and experimentation with an interesting style of storytelling. McKay and Randolph manage to create a cinematic story out of a jumble of numbers and conspiracies that is entertaining. The one big challenge with the film is that there’s an overload of information. There’s just too much to wrap your head around, and while they try and simplify it to a degree in the film, for someone without a financial bent of mind, it’s still a lot. In their focus to deliver an accurate, detailed version of the events, there is a lack of human connection with the characters and the film on the whole. You just don’t feel invested in their stories, in their highs and lows and you’re not rooting for anyone and that’s where the film loses on substance. If the Academy had a category for most stylish film of the year, it would be The Big Short no questions asked, but it ain’t our pick for Best Picture!
Until next time, keep the popcorn tub handy!
Adi & Sahil
@ThePopcornWaltz
