“The Big Short” is not short, it’s long; 2 hours and 10 minutes long and it’s certainly not for everyone. It’s a movie for people who are policy wonks and pessimists, study human nature, like quirky movies and will watch one about the causes of America’s financial meltdown in 2007. That’s a pretty small potential audience, but I admit I’m included.
If you’re already bored to tears by the prospect of non-escapism don’t even read anymore, just go about your business because the head-shaking subject matter is the movie; the named and re-named real life characters are interesting but just incidental. The true stars are the greed, stupidity and hubris that cost the American taxpayers $5 trillion. There were guilty parties at every level, but the investment banks, rating agencies and mortgage industry were certainly near the top.
There are no car chases or sex scenes apart from some mild nudity. Except for a few extremely beautiful women who talk to the camera to explain things the main operators are nearly all men because the banking and investment business is mostly made up of men. The few women in power are just as money hungry, compromised and dishonest as their male counterparts; you want equality, you got equality.
It’s a tragi-comedy about a few brilliant and/or lucky people and small maverick investor groups who discover that America’s vaunted mortgage bond market was merely a housing bubble that was enormously over-rated and over-subscribed and not worth the paper it was written on, how the system was rigged to get it, and keep it, that way.
They figured out how to short, or bet against, the housing market and some of them were really concerned about the consequences of the potential collapse. They try warning the markets, but no one will listen to them. Manias, power and profits tend to make one deaf and blind to all criticism and warnings.
As usual the dialogs are stuffed with F-bombs (do people really talk that way?). Between the dialogs there are interesting observations including on screen quotations such as this attributed to Mark Twain, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
The movie is best wrapped up with another on screen quotation. Overheard at a Washington, D.C. bar: “Truth is like poetry. And most people hate poetry.” (I cleaned it up for this G-rated review).