The Big Short is a comedy about the end of the world, and it never lets you forget the bill. Adam McKay’s 2015 film takes Michael Lewis’s 2010 book about the 2008 financial crisis and turns it into something rare: an explainer that keeps its temper. It runs 131 minutes, it stars Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling and Brad Pitt, and it does the one thing most movies about money refuse to do — it tells you where the money went.
Trailer, via Paramount Pictures.
Michael Burry and the Subprime Bet
The film opens in 2005. Michael Burry, played by Bale, runs a hedge fund called Scion Capital. Burry is eccentric, and the movie lets him be, but his discovery is not eccentric at all: the U.S. housing market is extremely unstable because of subprime loans. He sees similarities to the 1930s crisis and calculates the market will collapse in 2007.
So he goes to the banks and buys credit default swaps. The premiums are substantial and monthly. Lawrence Fields, Burry’s principal client and a fictional composite of Joel Greenblatt and other Scion investors who disagreed with the strategy, accosts him for it. Fields’ point is arithmetic, not spite: if Burry is wrong, the premiums bankrupt his fund in a couple of years. Burry holds firm.
That standoff is the spine of the movie. Everything after it is other people arriving at Burry’s conclusion for worse reasons.
Jared Vennett Sells the Trade
A Deutsche Bank executive mentions Burry’s dealings to a co-worker, Jared Vennett, played by Gosling. Vennett senses an opportunity and starts pitching the short. He misdials a trader at FrontPoint Partners. The firm is interested anyway.
Vennett’s pitch is where The Big Short does its best teaching. He explains the fraud in the market and the disingenuity of bonds that look safe. Mark Baum, who runs FrontPoint, is moved less by the profit than by his disenchantment with banking’s business model. Carell plays Baum in a state of constant disgust, and the performance is the film’s engine.
This is a true story.
That tagline sits on the poster, and the movie earns it by refusing to make the short sellers heroes. They are right. They are also getting rich off a collapse that will ruin millions of people, and McKay keeps both facts in frame.
FrontPoint Goes to Florida
Baum’s team travels to south Florida to check Vennett’s claims. They find empty neighborhoods. They meet mortgage brokers who admit to fraudulent practices. The sequence is the movie’s argument in miniature: the numbers were never abstract, and someone signed every loan.
The team decides to invest with Vennett. Meanwhile, in a lobby at JPMorgan Chase, two young investors find Vennett’s presentation sitting on a coffee table. Charlie Geller and Jamie Shipley, played by John Magaro and Finn Wittrock, run Brownfield Fund. They are convinced immediately by the potential payouts, but their fund is too small to matter alone.
So they bring in Ben Rickert, Shipley’s neighbor and a retired securities trader, played by Brad Pitt. Rickert agrees to help, and the trio starts buying credit default swaps. Their arc is the cleanest in the film because it has the fewest moving parts: small fund, big trade, one adult in the room.
The Cast Behind the Trades
The supporting bench is unusually deep for a movie this technical. Hamish Linklater, Rafe Spall and Jeremy Strong play Porter Collins, Danny Moses and Vinny Daniel, Baum’s team at FrontPoint. Marisa Tomei plays Cynthia Baum. Melissa Leo plays Georgia Hale. Tracy Letts plays Fields. Adepero Oduye plays Kathy Tao, the Morgan Stanley employee who oversees Baum’s fund. Karen Gillan plays Evie, an SEC employee and Jamie’s brother’s ex-girlfriend, whom he meets in Las Vegas. Byron Mann plays a CDO manager Baum interviews there.
Several characters are compressed versions of real people. Burry is real, and the real Burry appears in a cameo as a worker at Scion Capital. Baum is based on Steve Eisman. Vennett is based on Greg Lippmann. Rickert is based on Ben Hockett. Geller is based on Charlie Ledley, Shipley on James Mai. Fields is the one outright invention, a composite built to carry the objections of investors who thought Burry had lost his mind.
The casting history is its own small story. Variety reported on January 13, 2015 that Pitt, Bale and Gosling would star, with Pitt producing alongside Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner through Plan B Entertainment and Paramount distributing. Carell joined the next day. Deadline revealed more of the ensemble on April 21, 2015. Max Greenfield joined on April 23. Gillan tweeted about her involvement on May 8. Jeffry Griffin, who plays Vennett’s assistant Chris, was originally booked as an extra and got a speaking role after a production assistant pulled him out of a crowd.
A $50 Million Budget and $133 Million Back
The Big Short began a limited release on December 11, 2015, followed by a wide release on December 23. It grossed $133 million against a $50 million budget. McKay and Charles Randolph wrote the screenplay, and it won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor for Bale, and Best Film Editing. It picked up four Golden Globe nominations, including Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, Best Screenplay for Randolph, and two Best Actor nods for Bale and Carell.
The awards record matters less than what the script does with a subject that usually gets either a lecture or a villain. The screenplay’s job is to make subprime loans legible, and it does that by keeping the human stakes attached to every trade.
What The Big Short Gets Right
The Big Short is not a documentary and does not pretend to be one. Fields never existed. Timelines are compressed. Some of the cameos are there to flatter an audience that already knows how the story ends.
None of that undercuts the central claim, which the film states plainly and never walks back: the 2008 financial crisis was triggered by the United States housing bubble, and the bubble was built out of loans that people were paid to write and paid to bundle. The short sellers are the lens, not the subject. The subject is the machine.
Where the movie is weakest is where it is most pleased with itself. The asides are funny and they land, but comprehension and comedy sit awkwardly together in a film this angry. The Florida sequence does the opposite, and it is the best stretch of the film for exactly that reason — no jokes, no celebrities, just empty houses and brokers describing fraud as a normal cost of doing business.
Bale and Carell carry the weight. Bale plays Burry as a man who is right and cannot make anyone care, which is a lonelier performance than the film’s marketing suggested. Carell plays Baum as someone who wanted to believe in the system and now has to price its collapse. Both performances were singled out in the film’s acclaim, and they are why the movie works.
This is a film that treats its audience as capable of following a credit default swap, and it is right. It also treats them as capable of being angry, and it is right about that too. The Big Short is funny, fast, and finally sad in a way it never announces. It is the rare movie about a catastrophe that explains the mechanism without explaining away the damage.
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