The Big Short (***1/4)

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.

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viewed 1/24/16 1:30 pm at Roxy and posted 1/25/16

The Reluctant Fundamentalist (**3/4)

In films such as Mississippi Masala and The Namesake, Mira Nair has frequently focused on individuals caught between two worlds or identities. Here, adapting a novel by Mohsin Hamid, she adds to that a suspense element. The main character is Changez (Riz Ahmed), a Pakistani university professor suspected of being involved in the kidnapping of an American in Lahore. But he is also a former Wall Street hotshot who specialized in trimming waste (and personnel) from struggling companies. His story is told in a series of flashbacks constructed around a conversation between Changez and a journalist (Lieve Shcreiber) after the kidnapping.

There is a mutual distrust that is not, as we learn, entirely irrational. Changez fears that he will be arrested; the journalist wonders if Changez is guilty. How did the clean-cut, America-loving Princeton student become a bearded radical? Naturally, 9/11 and its aftermath is a turning point. In a welcome change from her frothier roles, Kate Hudson plays Changez’s American love interest, an artist, and Om Puri plays his father. (Puri also played the father in My Son the Fanatic, which had a theme that somewhat echoes this.)

As a meditation on Changez’s internal conflict, this is competent. As a suspense drama, it’s pretty decent, but the fact that we don’t know if Changez is guilty is partly the result of the surface-level character depiction. His turn toward an anti-American radicalism is depicted as primarily the result of unfair treatment. But surely, there is an ideological inspiration behind such a change in this intellectually gifted man. Has he adopted a radical interpretation of Islam? (We see one scene in a mosque, and that’s about it.) Has he read Noam Chomsky? Admittedly, this is difficult turf for a film. Nair has not made the definitive film on terrorism, but merely a decent yarn with a political dimension.

IMDb link

viewed 4/29/13 7:30 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 4/30/13

Margin Call (***1/2)

Imagine you have a live hand grenade and have to decide whether to hold onto it, knowing it will explode, or toss it away, knowing it will kill or maim people around you. There you have the nub of this suspense drama whose entire plot, playing over the course of about 30 hours, would make a very good short story. I’m speaking broadly of course, which is how the characters, Wall Street traders, in the movie speak. They say things like “We’re gonna do this thing” and “Have you ever done anything like this?” Or “At the time there didn’t seem to be much of a choice,” to which the answer is “There never does.” To elliptical (yet pointed, precise) dialogue add a tense score, a dash of grim humor, and the night-time atmospherics of empty offices, and I found my attention held for an hour and a half.

Basically, writer-director J.C. Chandor (in his first feature) imagines a scenario whereby the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers had been given a dire warning just before it was too late. Or maybe it’s based on a firm like Goldman Sachs, which outlasted the financial crisis. Despite a dash of moralizing, Chandor does not paint his characters as a pack of jackals, though Jeremy Irons, as the top man, comes close. Rather, he comes closer to saying that the money involved, all legal in this case, would be hard for anyone to resist. In fact, the two number-crunchers who issue the dire warning (Stanley Tucci and Zachary Quinto) are both engineers who wound up doing what—and here’s the moralizing—they both imply is a less useful, but more lucrative, application of their talents. Tucci’s character makes a big speech that rather hammers home the point.

The film has no one star, but Kevin Spacey, as the immediate boss of the number crunchers and the traders, comes the closest. Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, and Simon Baker play other higher ups at the firm. That they all seemed to have individual personalities despite the fairly limited screen time helps keep things interesting even though the plot moves slowly. Eventually, Spacey gets to make a compelling speech making the simultaneous case for tossing the hand grenade and holding it. Ultimately, the question is more interesting than the answer, and thus the ending is anticlimactic. If you have no idea what the title means, this movie may bore you. If you’re an expert on, or curious about, the financial collapse, you might wish for more financial nitty gritty. The entire plot hinges on the riskiness of mortgage-backed securities, but only one line in the script actually uses the word “mortgages.” But if you’re looking for a sharply focused, modern parable, this’ll do nicely.

IMDB link


viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 10/26/11

The Pursuit of Happyness (***3/4)

 ? Will Smith plays Christopher Gardner, a salesman trying to stay afloat and take advantage of opportunity, in the early 1980s. Italian director Gabriele Muccino (whose Last Kiss was remade this year) makes his English-language debut with a script by Steve Conrad (The Weather Man).

+ I figured I’d like this movie when Gardner tells a janitor that the inspiring slogan on the wall outside his son’s day-care facility is misspelled (hence this film’s title). Only then does he mention the four-letter graffito someone added. Thanks to such details, this is a true story that actually feels like one. With a minimum of melodrama, it gives a picture of how tough it is to dig yourself out from a financial hole without a support system, and without shortcuts. Yeah, the movie’s a feel-good story, but if you look at how hard Gardner had to work to get ahead, and how smart he had to be, you can understand why so many people who are not lazy and not stupid can’t do what he did. The bone-density scanners Gardner carries around for much of the film provide both a running sight gag and a metaphor for the weight of the past mistakes he’s trying to overcome. The movie this reminded me of was the underrated Cinderella Man. Although that was about Depression-era boxer Jim Braddock, it was the other fairly recent movie that made me feel something of what it must be like to have to worry about every dollar, and the indignity of not being able to shield your family from the effects of that day-to-day struggle. Smith, in what might be his first regular-guy film role since Made in America, tones down but maintains his on-screen affability. Smith’s son Jaden plays the same role in the movie; he’s a natural.

- I guess if I wanted to criticize this I could say that whereas Cinderella Man used Braddock’s story as a window into Depression-era America, this doesn’t use do anything but show one man’s unlikely path to success. I could say that the movie falsely implies that anyone can make it by hard work and fortitude, whereas in reality Gardner also had a great deal of innate intelligence that also made that possible. I could say that it’s a movie about a poor black guy trying to make it in corporate America that nonetheless has nothing to say about the intersection of race and poverty. But if this isn’t a movie of great social import, it is well-paced, moving, and consistently entertaining.

= ***3/4 I found this Pursuit absorbing from beginning to end.

IMDb link