Let's Go Out To The Movies: "The Big Short": Part Docudrama, Part History Lesson, All Amazing

Directed by Adam McKay
Written by Adam McKay and
Charles Randolph

(R - Paramount - 2 hrs, 10 mins)

Alo Party Peoples.

This is not a politics site. If you see me doing election coverage here, feel free to punch me in the face. It isn't like I don't have political opinions, anyone that follows me on Twitter knows that's not the case, but that's not the thing that determines how I rate a movie. Like the man said, "It's not what a movie is about, it's how it's about it." Normally this isn't that huge an issue here, but when you're reviewing a movie about the lead-up to the Great Recession, there is no way to avoid talking about politics.

My appraisal of The Big Short is not based on its agenda or my agenda. My appraisal of The Big Short is based on it being a well directed, extremely well acted, forcefully well made film that has a compelling point to make, presents the facts as it understands them to back it up, and does so in a consistently engaging way that makes something as byzantine and obtuse as the housing bubble seem like the greatest heist in history.

It's like a Michael Moore movie if he wasn't a borderline propogandist that made his entire side look either insuffrable or insane. Where Moore starts with a conclusion and makes shit up to justify it, The Big Short does the reasearch and then comes to the conclusion that the housing market collapsed because of systemic fraud. It's part docudrama and part economic history lesson, and it's all amazing.

But it's the kind of amazing that is very difficult to write about. You almost have to see it to know what I'm talking about, it takes a story about bankers and stocks and mortgages and stuff that's all very complicated and dull, and makes that very complicated dullness part of its point. When a system is so intricately dense and immensely important but at the same time so mindnumbigly uninteresting to the layman, it's not only prime for corruption, it's practically designed for it. 

So says Christian Bale as Michael Burry, a hedge fund manager that looks into the mortgage security industry and discovers that the supposedly sturdy housing market has beome a bottomless pit of fraudulent investment. That when people haven't paid anything to own their house, they don't feel particularly invested in it, so they don't pay their mortgage, so he decides to short the market, essentially betting that it will fail, something that eventually gets out to other stock investors, waiting for the market to go south.

The truly remarkable thing about The Big Short is that it makes something as intentionally convoluted as the housing bubble feel simple, shifting between docudrama and history lesson as it enthusiastically presents a matter of fact account of what a mortgage backed security is, how it was a sound idea when it started, and that it was slowly corrupted over the decades as the lenders became increasingly lax about who they were lending to. It effortlessly jumps from meetings in board rooms explaining the collapse in terms of Jenga blocks to ominous shots of McMansions looming like icebergs over the average home buyer to Selena Gomez and an economist explaining insurance on securities in a casino. 

I can already see people decrying The Big Short as a left-wing screed about regulations, when I told my father that it was about the housing market he immediately assumed that it was - and I can only imagine what happens once it starts screening for the general public around Christmas - but its ultimate point is strikingly non-partisan. That fraud is not only morally wrong, it's unsustainable in the long run. If that counts as a left wing screed, then call me a Marxist.

Bottom line, The Big Short is one of the best films of the year, and if nothing else you should go see it so you can have an informed opinion when someone immediately cries "liberal agenda" when it gets a slew of nominations at this year's Oscars.

Have a nice day.

Greg.B

FINAL RATING: 5/5