Movie Review - The Big Short directed by Adam McKay

My idea of high finance is transferring money from my chequing account into my contingency fund and hoping there are no expensive surprises in the offing. The Big Short directed by Adam McKay is about the financial crash in 2007 - 2008 brought about by the housing bubble in the United States. Sounds frighteningly boring doesn’t it?  However, the story told was anything but boring. The story started by introducing Dr. Michael Burry played by Christian Bale, an investor with his own company that was one of the first, if not the very first to recognized before 2007 that there would be a crash. Extremely eccentric, but amazing with numbers and finance, he started acting on his knowledge to the extreme dismay of his colleagues. Other investors, Jared Venett (Ryan Gosling), Mark Baum (Steve Carell), Charlie Geller (John Magaro), Porter Collins (Hamish Linklater) and Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt), not connected to Dr. Burry, started picking up the scent of money. Each of them traveled in different personal circles. These five characters were based loosely on real people, but the names were changed. 

This movie could have in fact been quite difficult but this story was clevery presented. There were freeze shots with one person explaining a situation. One scene, a blond in a bubble bath with a glass of wine explaining the pending fall was really quite amusing. Another board room scene, when Jared Venett was proposing a deal to Mark Baum, was a very visual demonstration of the pending mortgage crises using stacked blocks.

Well done, this movie was illuminating, amusing and distressing.  Bravery in the face of fraudulent monetary gain was in short supply. Greed was not.

“If we’re right, people lose homes. People lose jobs. People lose 

retirement savings, people lose pensions. You know what I hate about 

banking? It reduces people to numbers. Here’s a number - every 

1% unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die, did you know that?

~ Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt), The Big Short

Director
Adam McKay
Partial Cast
Christian Bale - Dr. Michael Burry
Steve Carell  - Mark Baum
Marisa Tomei - Cynthia Baum
Ryan Gosling - Jared Vennett
John Magaro - Charlie Geller
Finn Wittrock - Jamie Shipley
Brad Pitt - Ben Rickert
Rafe Spall - Danny Moses
Hamish Linklater - Porter Collins
Jereny Strong - Vinny Daniel

Movie based on novel of the same name by Michael Lewis