The Big Short

One of the pleasures of "The Wolf of Wall Street" was its devil-may-care attitude towards the details of financial fraud.  Several times in the film, Leonardo DiCaprio turns to the camera and begins explaining some nefarious scheme of his character, stockbroker Jordan Belfort.  He quickly abandons his tutorials, though, and says something like "Who cares?  The point is it was illegal and it made me lots of money."  "Wolf" isn't concerned with the minutiae.  It's more interested in laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of it all.  We let crooks like Belfort get away with it because we want to believe we really can get rich quick.

On the other hand, Adam McKay, writer-director of "The Big Short," believes that the devil is in the details.  He was furious enough to actually learn about what Wall Street was doing.  Not many have done so; after all, who wants to learn what a collateralized debt obligation is?  Let the bankers do the banking.  But it's this technical jargon, McKay believes, that allows the financial sector to get away with robbery in plain sight.

And so "The Big Short" is here to explain to us what a synthetic credit default swap is.  It sounds more like an NPR segment than a Hollywood film.  Not to worry, though; McKay has plenty of sugar to help the medicine go down.  He enlists celebrities such as Margot Robbie, floating in a bubble bath, to help explain these terms.  ("Wolf," of course, gave us Robbie in...nothing.)

Oh, and there's a story too, with a colorful cast of characters:

• Steve Carell plays an irate hedge fund manager betting against the market.  Michael Scott was excellent preparation for the role; Carell is just as boorish here, but you forgive him because he happens to be right.
• Christian Bale does his typical Method-y thing as Dr. Michael Burry, the savant who foresaw the mortgage market's collapse.  It isn't too gimmicky.
• Ryan Gosling plays a Deustche Bank trader who doesn't care that the market will tank, so long as he can make money off it.  Gosling barely tries, but he's so charismatic that it doesn't matter.  He can sleepwalk through the role and get away with it.
• Brad Pitt plays a mentor to two young investors who get wind of the coming storm.  As with "12 Years a Slave," Pitt has taken a small part in this film to help secure financing.  It's great that he helps get good movies made.  But is it too much to ask for him to put in a little effort for his 10 minutes of screen time?

The film threads a nice needle, showing how the crisis was both foreseeable and largely unanticipated.  The truth was out there.  But finding it took both hard work and a willingness to face the reality that every party has an end.  Most would prefer to keep dancing.

In the movie's most effective sequence, Carell and his staff travel to Florida to get the facts on the ground.  They talk to mortgage brokers who brag about seeking out the largest possible credit risks--bigger commissions, after all!  To Wall Street, mortgages had become nothing more than numbers concerning faraway people in flyover country.  McKay puts a human face on the crisis.

So what's the proper response to our immoral financial sector?  The amusement of "Wolf" or the indignation of "The Big Short"?  They say that comedy equals tragedy plus time.  I don't think it's a coincidence that the events depicted in "Wolf" occurred a decade earlier, or that Scorcese has a couple extra decades of perspective compared to McKay.  Perhaps one day we'll look back on all this and laugh.  It's about the only solace we can take from the rapaciousness of Wall Street.