“The Big Short”

Rated R

****

Opens today

Review by A.O. Scott

New York Times

A true crime story and a madcap comedy, a heist movie and a scalding polemic, “The Big Short” will affirm your deepest cynicism about Wall Street while simultaneously restoring your faith in Hollywood.

Written and directed by Adam McKay (“Anchorman,” “Anchorman 2”), the film sets itself a tall order. It wants not only to explain the financial crisis of 2008 — following the outline of Michael Lewis’ best-selling nonfiction book — but also to make the dry, complex abstractions of high finance exciting and fun. The story swerves and swings from executive suites and conference rooms to hectic Manhattan streets and desolate Florida subdivisions. The performances, the script and the camera itself seem to be running on a cocktail of Red Bull, Adderall and mescaline.

It’s a trip. At the end your brain hurts, and you feel sick to your stomach. But that queasy, empty feeling is the point: This is a terrifically enjoyable movie that leaves you in a state of rage, nausea and despair. What is to be done with those feelings is the great moral and political challenge McKay has set for the audience.

“The Big Short” is not the first movie to reckon with the fraud and stupidity that brought the world economy to the brink of collapse not so long ago and that continues to exact a heavy toll in social misery and political alienation. Charles Ferguson’s 2010 documentary “Inside Job” remains the definitive cinematic account of the regulatory, intellectual and ethical failures that led to the crisis. But rather than rehash familiar ground, “The Big Short” achieves a fresh and brilliant synthesis of knowing insider-ism and populist incitement.

Lewis’ book, released in 2010, offered readers the illusion of retroactive prescience. You could read about the insanity of bundling subprime mortgages into highly rated investment products and think: Well, of course that was a recipe for disaster. Of course a drop in the housing market would bring the whole thing crashing down like a Jenga tower. We knew it all along.

In fact, almost none of us did. Certainly not the government officials and banking executives who remain at liberty and in positions of power to this day. Or if they did know, they didn’t care. The truth about what the banks and their enablers were doing was obvious only to a handful of people (one of whom, in the movie, is shown demonstrating the Jenga tower metaphor I just borrowed). McKay, with a comedy writer’s eye for archetypes, sorts them into an amusing array of strongly defined characters.

There is the anti-social numbers guy, Dr. Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a fund manager who sits in his office wearing a T-shirt and rubber slippers, betting his client’s money on financial catastrophe. There is the righteously angry crusader, Mark Baum (Steve Carell), a disaffected Wall Streeter who sees a similar wager as the perfect expression of his contempt for the big banks. And there are the young indie upstarts, Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) and Charlie Geller (John Magaro), college buddies whose “garage band” fund was started with their own money.

Linking these motley iconoclasts, and serving as our guide to the apocalypse unfolding around them, is Jared Vennett, a silky cynic played by Ryan Gosling. From time to time Vennett will look toward the camera to tell us that something didn’t really happen in quite that way — or that, incredibly enough, it actually did.

The teams conspiring to short the market are impossible not to root for, and the work of the movie’s sprawling ensemble is delightful.

But when we root for Baum and Burry to be proved right, for Shipley and Geller to hit pay dirt and for Vennett to earn the right to be smug in perpetuity, we are also hoping for ruin to be visited on millions of people. Houses, nest eggs, jobs and lives will be lost. Brad Pitt, in a gravelly turn as Ben Rickert, Shipley and Geller’s paranoid guru, makes this point explicitly when he scolds his proteges for celebrating their good fortune. He says what needs to be said, but the achievement of “The Big Short” is that McKay doesn’t only underline the moral of the story in dialogue. The film’s final images, its abrupt shift in tone from exhilaration to exhaustion, and its suddenly downbeat music (by Nicholas Britell) all combine to trigger a climactic wave of disgust.

Because, as we know — and as we can stand, from time to time, to be reminded — there is no happy ending to this story, no punishment for the crime. A movie is unlikely to change that, and “The Big Short,” in many ways a startlingly ambitious film, is modest about what it can do. It offers no solutions and no comfort. The best it can do is put down a marker.

© 2015 The New York Times Company