"The Big Short", though funny, doesn't sugarcoat a crisis

The scenario illustrated in "The Big Short" (2015, USA) is practically a doomsday scenario. It may not be the kind in which zombies have overruled the planet or an incurable virus has decimated humanity or a massive natural calamity has wreaked havoc everywhere. Nevertheless, its aftermath had essentially left everyone in the bottomest pit of despair and destitution: the US financial crisis of 2007-2008, considered to be the worst crisis of such kind that had hit the country since the Great Depression of the 1930s. As a matter of fact, economists and analysts even labeled the contemporary crisis as the "Great Recession". 

Yet, however serious and relevant it had become, does anyone of us actually remember the crisis? Or even care about it? I, for one, didn't give much of a hoot about it. Can't really blame us, for the technicalities and principles of the financial catastrophe are admittedly complex and convoluted to be fully understood in just one go. Besides, numbers, formulas and statistics can be pretty boring, right? For us ordinary folks, what primarily matters, as it were, is the immediate impact that such an event can have on us, whether or not we actually understand the mechanisms that brought about the impact: unemployment, homelessness, material scarcity, price increase in basic commodities, etc. It makes sense how one of the characters in "The Big Short" remarks that Wall Street really prefers those bunch of financial and market terms to be headscratchers, so that people will not bother about them and thus will not question things. A fostering of the can't-beat-'em-so-join-'em attitude. 

Thankfully, director Adam McKay (a Saturday Night Live alumnus) and co-writer Charles Randolph (adapting for the screen financial journalist Michael Lewis' book) have made an undeniably entertaining film about the major financial crisis, utilizing onscreen texts, fourth wall-breaking commentaries and tutorials and some actual footages to lay on the table the basics of the dire situation. That such semi-documentary techniques are utilized is in accordance with the non-fiction nature of Lewis' book (which, by the way, bears the subtitle Inside the Doomsday Machine) and the immediacy of the situation is made more palpable by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd's restlessly-probing camera and extreme close-ups, so much so that we sometimes feel that it's Lars von Trier who's filming everything. But make no mistake about it: despite using humor to bring across some urgent and relevant points, one can't deny the harrowing subject-matter that lies at the core of the film. In here, one can certainly sense the filmmaker's vitriolic anger, so much so that we fear that by the time the film ends, we won't be leaving the theater unscathed. This is pitch-black comedy of the first order. "The Big Short" is indeed the very first socially-relevant film that has hit our local theaters this year. 

If Denis Villeneuve's outstanding "Sicario" takes the defeatist route in regards the drug cartel between US and Mexico, so does McKay's "The Big Short" as regards the economic and monetary crunch of things. 

Likewise, one can't deny the ensemble power of the film. On first impression, the film's poster may suggest that all the 4 lead actors - Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt - are grouped together for most of the time inside a boardroom discussing the economic state of affairs. The fact is, all the 4 actors are never for once seen in a scene altogether (except for Carell and Gosling together). The film, in a sense, follows different narrative threads involving these different characters, each of whom strives to make the best - or make sense - out of a worst possible scenario, already looming at large. We have Jared Vennett (Gosling, serving also as the film's narrator), a slimey trader;Michael Burry (Bale), a slightly off-the-wall hedge fund manager;Mark Baum (Carell), a volatile hedge fund manager;and Ben Rickert (Pitt), a retired banker who's now deep into all things New Age and yet is still pulled into the trading system by two young and eager, yet inexperienced investors, Charlie and Jamie (some kind of a Kafkaesque duo). All these men have varying degrees of stake involved in the situation, yet all of them have the perception to see the impending collapse of their country's financial structure (primarily built on high-risk and too-unstable housing loans, granted by way of a quite lax and inaccurate credit system), before anyone else does and believes such, and thus muster all the guts to make the most profit out of the bursting-bubble scenario. 

So we see that these characters are both losers and opportunists, outsiders and prophets, not exactly the most loveable characters in cinema. Yet, we still manage to attach ourselves to them, to catch for our breath as we see them navigating their way through this landmine-like labyrinth of financial crisis, with each of the actors potently illustrating his respective character's dilemma and capturing the peculiar tics and traits of the character, not to mention the generally "unattractive" look. 

"The Big Short" surely has a large dose of bitter pills for the policymakers, lawmakers, think-tanks and those who should've known better to swallow, giving them a taste of their own medicine. Had this film been made in any other more prohibitive times in American history, I was wondering if it would've made its way to the cinemas. As quoted in the film, truth is like poetry - and people hates poetry. 

Money men getting into the heat of things in Adam McKay's "The Big Short"