![]() Adapted from Michael Lewis’s book of the same name, this spin-art collage of genres and visual styles might look like a comedy from a director best known for his collaborations with Will Ferrell. But don’t believe the hype: For every moment of gallows humor, “The Big Short” is a sober-minded, profoundly angry piece of agit prop, as ham-handed in its outrage as in its attempts to couch its wordy economics lessons in slick vignettes and winking gimmicks. “The Big Short” revolves around three sets of players: a money manager named Mark Baum (Steve Carell), a reclusive former banker named Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) and Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a visionary fund manager in California who in 2005 sees a housing market teetering on the brink of Depression-era foreclosure rates. Ignoring the objections of his investors, Burry decides to bet against the historically rock-solid mortgage bond market. When he travels to Wall Street to create a financial instrument to short the market, his strategy comes to the attention of Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), a spray-tanned, carefully permed trader who acts as “The Big Short’s” swaggering, clench-jawed narrator.Ī madcap montage of expository speeches, hyperventilating meetings, revelatory encounters with corrupt brokers and their hapless marks, “The Big Short” feels less like an immersive story than a lecture delivered by the hippest Econ 101 professor on campus, illustrated with glib asides and state-of-the-art visual aids. Punctuated by occasional collages of snippets from Madison Avenue, MTV and McKay and Ferrell’s website Funny or Die (that’s McKay’s daughter, Pearl, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it clip), “The Big Short” will resort to anything to grab the audience’s attention, even if it means having a character deliver his lines while brushing his teeth, or stopping the movie dead in its tracks for a celebrity tutorial on subprime mortgages or debt repackaging. ![]() Michael Burry (Christian Bale) predicted the housing market crash and made millions for himself and other investors. ![]() That approach works until McKay’s control begins to slip: Unlike “ The Wolf of Wall Street” (which is explicitly invoked in one of those celebrity cameos), “The Big Short” can’t exactly be accused of celebrating the greedy bro culture it’s indicting. ![]() But McKay can’t slow down long enough to let the information unfold naturally, by way of the story and organic design elements. ![]() “ Moneyball,” another Lewis adaptation that Pitt produced and starred in, possessed its share of arcana, but that movie handled abstract factoids with far more grace and organic humor. ![]()
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March 2023
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