A sequence where Baum and his team, exploring the stability of the sub-prime market, visit an almost entirely vacated tract of new homes in Miami is weighted with a compassion that most other scenes lack. His passion for the material, and fury at the system he’s portraying, is palpable, but The Big Short is at its best when it slows down for a second. His camera zooms wildly into characters’ faces, slowing down and blurring as if succumbing to a fit of rage, turning even the most basic exchanges of dialogue into action scenes. This is part of the freewheeling charm that made McKay such an exciting voice in comic filmmaking over the last 10 years-he’s collaborated with Will Ferrell on films like Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, and The Other Guys, all of which contained similar mad flourishes.īut it often feels like McKay is working his hardest to spice up a film that mostly consists of phone conversations. If the very phrase “collateralized debt obligations” sends you to Wikipedia, McKay and co-writer Charles Randolph have a solution for that- The Big Short does its best to parcel out information about each element of the crisis as plainly as possible, even enlisting surprise celebrity cameos to break the fourth wall and talk straight to the audience about credit-default swaps and the like. Each of them independently identify the ticking time-bomb of subprime mortgages and collateralized debt obligations, ignored by Wall Street’s rating agencies only Baum seems the least bit angry about what their coming collapse implies. Our heroes, such as they are, include Michael Burry (Christian Bale), an anti-social savant who nearly drives his hedge fund into bankruptcy by making a billion-dollar bet that the housing market will collapse Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), a slimy trader who’s been ostracized for telling his colleagues the sky is falling Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt), a retired trader and paranoiac convinced of Wall Street’s underlying corruption and Mark Baum (Steve Carell), a phlegmatic money manager who’s the closest thing the film has to a hero. McKay shoots every phone call and boardroom meeting so kinetically and lumps in wild dashes of humor, but by the end of the film, he wants the audience holding their heads in their hands with dismay. Here are people who saw through the lies perpetrated at every level of the booming markets in the mid-2000s, each of them charming renegades in their own ways, but in profiting off of it, they were really just symptoms of a larger problem. McKay tells those same stories, and yet at times it feels like The Big Short can’t decide if its protagonists are heroes or villains. Lewis’s book covered Wall Street’s astute few who foresaw the 2008 recession and “shorted,” or bet against it, making billions off of the country’s economic ruin. A Gentler, Better Way to Change Minds Arthur C.

The big short book