The film works around the housing crisis from a variety of perspectives as all these characters dig into it, and that's part of its accessibility. They do look like a heist crew - colorful, prickly, individualistic fast talkers, each with a separate strength - except for the part where they largely aren't working together, or even working with the same intent. And Ryan Gosling plays Jared Vennett (based on trader Greg Lippmann), our smug narrator, who often explains what's going on directly to the camera, and uses a customized Jenga set to clearly illustrate what the housing market is about to do.
Brad Pitt plays Ben Rickert (based on capital investor Ben Hockett) as a quietly paranoid outsider who made his millions and got out of the business, but gets pulled back in, heist-movie-style, by a couple of ambitious young up-and-comer traders (Finn Wittrock and John Magaro) who need his connections to make their business work. Other characters are more invented: Steve Carell as Mark Baum (based on money manager Steve Eisman) is a bristly asshole who serves as an unlikely audience avatar, investigating the looming crisis stage by stage, and getting angrier and angrier on the world's behalf. Christian Bale plays hedge-fund manager Michael Burry as a barefoot, air-drumming metalhead savant who first sees the opportunity no one else sees, to "bet against the American economy" by shorting the housing market. Part of the sugar coating is a cast of familiar faces, inhabiting larger-than-life roles. McKay's film is coated in sugar to make it go down easy, but at its center, it's a bitter pill to swallow. But there's a deep, seething anger working under the surface of the film, at the laziness, selfishness, weakness, and indifference that drove the collapse. The film's theatrical trailer makes Big Short look like a star-studded heist movie just short of Ocean's Eleven, with a group of smart scallywags gleefully taking on a greedy banking industry and teaching the fat-cats a thing or two. The financial crisis was enabled by criminal misrepresentation and a lack of oversight, and it resulted in millions of people losing their jobs, homes, and businesses, at staggering taxpayer expense. The story is about industry-wide corruption and misrepresentation. McKay's film is coated in sugar, but it's a bitter pill to swallowīut while The Big Short is frequently hilarious, it isn't primarily a comedy. They've just never been this raucous, playful, and irreverent onscreen before. Lewis' books have been adapted before, with Moneyball and The Blind Side, and they're meant to be accessible to lay readers trying to understand how complicated issues make compelling stories. But his visual looseness and speedy comic beats are a surprisingly perfect approach here. McKay seems like an odd choice to adapt Michael Lewis' best-selling financial world exposé The Big Short: Will Ferrell's frequent writing partner and director on Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, The Other Guys, and Anchorman 2, McKay has a long history in improv-heavy comedy film, and something this tightly scripted, reality-focused, and significant seems like a stretch.
It's a cutesy, gimmicky approach, but it's also friendly to the audience, and appealingly unexpected. But to the rest of us, everyone who gets glassy-eyed at talk of collateralized debt obligation and super-senior tranches, director Adam McKay is like that one fun science teacher who illustrated chemical reactions by blowing things up in class. Viewers who already fully understand the principles behind the economic crisis of 2007 may feel a little patronized by The Big Short, a film that bends over backward to explain it in small, simple words. So here's Margot Robbie in a bubble bath to explain." And up pops Robbie, sipping champagne in a candlelit tub, explaining sub-prime mortgages to a jazzily edited sequence. Or even better, for you just to leave them the fuck alone. Wall Street loves to use confusing terms to make you think only they can do what they do. Early on, The Big Short reveals its philosophy about keeping its audience engaged and clear on the issues: "It's pretty confusing, right? Does it make you feel bored? Or stupid? Well, it's supposed to.