This unusual adaptation of Michael Lewis’s nonfiction bestseller is about the financial industry, but really it can be thought of as a modern version of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Except, imagine that instead of everyone being unwilling to say what everyone knows, everyone has been hearing the same thing so long that almost everyone actually believes it. “It” is, in this case, that housing prices never go down, only up. Even Michael Burry (Christian Bale), the Asperger-y hedge fund manager who seems most certain that the conventional wisdom is wrong, has a slight moment of doubt. The great thing about the film is not the way it explains things like collateralized debt obligations, or shorting, using such techniques as having Margot Robbie in a bathtub explaining them. No, the great thing is the way it portrays the behavior of complex societies.
Even as you know the financial collapse of 2008 is going to happen, you can see Burry and his fellow short-sellers — traders Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), Mark Baum (Steve Carrell), Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) — having to convince themselves that everyone can be that wrong, and facing enormous pressure to follow the crowd. The film is unusual, for one thing, in that none of these characters is the star. It’s an ensemble cast in an adaptation of a book that is actually telling three separate stories that are mostly unrelated, except for the common thread that these men —and this is a very male-dominated world — are making the same bet. Vennett is the seller of the bonds Carrell wants his New York investment group to buy, but both of them stand to make a fortune from calamity, and both are having to fight their own employers — big investment banks like Morgan Stanley — in order to do it. Geller and Shipley are do-it-yourself investors from Colorado who use an ex-trader friend (Brad Pitt) to do the same thing. These are all great characters, but Carrell and Bale stand out, possibly because their characters have the strangest, strongest personalities.
The other thing about this movie is the way it reminds you of its own artificiality, as if its telling you not make the mistake most financial people did during the early 2000s, failing to think critically. The bathtub scene is just one way director Adam McKay keeps telling you that this is just a movie. In another scene, Geller and Shipley find a brochure that seems to give them the idea to bet against the housing market, only to have Vennett, who is also the narrator, tell us that it actually happened a completely different way. The point is, exactly how it happened doesn’t matter. What happened matters. I think people who don’t have a familiarity with the subject may still miss some of the finer points. They can comfort themselves with the idea that a lot of the financial experts didn’t understand it well either, which is part of why it happened. Greed is the other part, and in the debate as to which factor explains more, McKay lets the viewer decide.
IMDb link
viewed 1/24/16 1:30 pm at Roxy and posted 1/25/16
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