The Big Short review: 'a comedy to make your blood boil'

Adam McKay's riotously entertaining portrait of the 'weirdos' who profited from the 2008 financial collapse will enlighten and infuriate you

When you sense catastrophe closing in, raising the alarm is the only decent human thing to do. But  you can count the decent humans in The Big Short on a single outstretched finger. 
This blackly uproarious satire on the 2008 financial crisis brings us shoulder to shoulder with the scumbags: the small band of Wall Street “outsiders and weirdos” (the film’s own words) who spotted the worsening fault lines in the bedrock of the US economy three years early, and reacted by betting against it and crossing their fingers for disaster.
That kind of negative investment is called shorting, and the film’s wryly paradoxical title – carried over from Michael Lewis’s page-turning exposé, on which it’s based – flags up the scam’s self-defeating nature. The film was directed by Adam McKay of Anchorman and Step Brothers fame: a man with a proven track record for wrangling testosterone-addled absurdity. His film somehow not only makes sense of mortgage bonds, collateralised debt obligations and credit default swaps, but makes them funny too. That achievement goes a long way to explaining why Oscar and Bafta voters felt moved to give it five nominations apiece.
The plot comes in three frayed strands, all of which are narrated and linked by Jared Vennett, a sleekly awful trader played by Ryan Gosling in a grey suit, queasy spray tan and slicked-back wig. He looks awful, and that’s part of the joke. Unlike The Wolf of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort, there’s nothing remotely seductive about these men or what they’re up to. What keeps you glued to them isn’t vicarious pleasure, but mounting disbelief as the scale of the impending collapse becomes grimly apparent.

Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling in The Big ShortCredit: Everett/REX/Shutterstock

The Tiresias-like figure (he even has a glass eye) who first spies trouble is muttering, barefoot fund manager Michael Burry (a fun, tic-heavy performance from Christian Bale) – and his short-selling investment strategy quickly catches the attention of Vennett, embittered hedge fund manager Mark Baum (Steve Carell, superb), and a pair of young investors reluctantly mentored by retired banker Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt), who all horn in on the scheme.
Working on a hunch, Burry discovers that a tranche of subprime loans are about to destabilise some supposedly unshakeable mortgage-backed securities, but there’s no point in me going into the nitty-gritty here – at least not when you can watch the film and have it spelled out by Margot Robbie in a bubble bath.
The film parcels up important information in glossy celebrity cutaways, which chide us for glazing over when it comes to the unsexy forces that shape our lives – but which also do an honourable job of bringing us up to speed. In one, the chef Anthony Bourdain compares CDOs (subprime mortgages bundled together as a supposedly safe investment) to a batch of seafood stew made with three-day-old halibut. As Bourdain explains: “It’s not old fish, it’s a whole new thing!”

Financial bubble: Margot Robbie in The Big Short

Baum and his team do most of the legwork, heading to Florida to prod warily at the housing bubble, and Las Vegas to marvel at the venality of the securitisation business (it’s to do with selling bundles of debt to third parties: Selena Gomez explains it better than I do). And there’s a newsy immediacy to all this, as if McKay’s roving, twitchy camera is actually catching his characters red-handed – and the frequent, unflattering freeze-frames even look like long-lens paparazzi shots.
Could The Big Short have worked as strait-laced drama? It certainly might have, but comedy is just right for it: it short-circuits your usual response mechanisms, making the scams more viscerally galling, the sense of outrage more blood-boilingly palpable. (Tellingly, it’s in the more conventionally dramatic scenes that fill in Burry and Baum’s unhappy backgrounds that the film hits its false notes.)
The laughs also ensure that, like the traders themselves, you get carried away in the moment, but when the time comes to weigh the cost, The Big Short’s moral punch turns out to be a haymaker. In a situation this ethically and mathematically mangled, even the solutions turn out to be part of the problem. Comedy has rarely felt this sobering.