The Big Short. Rated M (coarse language and nudity). 130 minutes. Directed by Adam McKay. Screenplay by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay. Based on the book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis.
The Big Short, a film about the housing market-fuelled global financial crisis of 2007, is both as interesting and as brain-numbingly boring as it sounds.
A poor cousin to Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), The Big Short is yet another story of greed, corruption, fraud, ambition and selfishness – those benchmark characteristics that continue to define those working at the top of the food chain on Wall Street in the USA.
The fine ensemble, lead by Christian Bale and Steve Carell, do lots of Really Big Acting – obviously aware that the majority of audience members around the world will be staring blankly at the screen wondering what it all means, and why it matters.
The Big Short’s significant flaw is that it did matter – enormously – and McKay (The Other Guys, Anchorman, Anchorman 2) struggles to find a way to prove that to be the case. Counter-pointed with oblique references to the tragic human cost of the continuing pandemic of greed, are a number of singularly indulgent and condescending cameos from celebrities (including The Wolf of Wall Street’s Margot Robbie) who try to explain what all the financial jargon means.
It’s a narrow conceit, particularly given that The Big Short is obsessed with the powerlessness we face when the financial system erodes the fundamental needs of hard-working people who simply want a roof over their heads.
If there is a lasting sensibility from the experience of this film, it is that you may leave the cinema determined to invest more in a life of simpler, spiritually enhancing experiences. Because the system that determines everything else about our future security and wellbeing is not, and never will be, ours to control.
This review was commissioned by the West Australian Newspaper Group.
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