MOVIE REVIEW: The Big Short

Yes! A chance to understand the mortgage derivatives debacle!  Visual Cliffs Notes - and droll, too.

The film critic Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian questions the film's ambiguous tone, finding the  campy irony created distance from sensitivity and sympathy for the victims. In fact, that was exactly so, and it makes the reality seem even more disheartening. I did not take this from the film myself, because I didn't forget, and it's mentioned several times by at least one of the characters, Mark Baum, played with intensity and range by Steve Carrell.

Perhaps we're used to motivational implants in our entertainment,and when a film doesn't send us striding out of the theater angry  some conclude it's flawed.(Isn't that why we have Bernie, folks?)  So Bradshaw deplores the "...exhausted acquiescence" we're left with at the conclusion.

But that's the point. Co-scripters Adam McKay and Charles Randolph write an indictment of consumerism and the alchemic greed it engenders, the Horatio Alger and level playing field myths we buy.

The disappearance of cost-value-profit relation that was supposed to be the core of traditional capitalist systems is our greatest loss - we should have known, right?  They even called the products "derivatives", but really they should have been called diminutives.

The film and the catastrophe it examines become another A-Exhibit in the depraved and conflicted philosophy advanced indy-tech capitalism has become.

Of course, the problem is that democratic capitalism doesn't  really want citizen integrity - it wants sheep to shear. Think of House of Cards and President Underwood's chilling campaign speech in which he proclaims "...You're not entitled."(Season 3) and the audience repeats it, chanting, "We're not entitled". Now there's a sardonic and cynical take on modern financial bureaucracy.  

I liked all the accomplished performances - ensemble-smooth quartet-style harmonies with distinctive individual personalities and a story for each of the "winners".

So who paid the smart and risk-taking short-sellers? (Remember, the corporation is to be viewed for legal purposes as a person.) I couldn't figure out how the Wall Street carriers of their short positions had any money left to pay out after their failures.  

Oh, silly me, it was us, the American people, who provided a bailout to the banks who knew we would.  

Back to the film - I liked the synthesis of docu-drama, shopping channel exposition, and reality TV. Expert editing and cross-cuts  take the film to a finely tuned farcical, artful place. It's a fine, intelligent, engaging work, as was the film Moneyball, based on a book by the same author as The Big Short, Michael Lewis.