This week we watched The Big Short another film nominated for best Oscar, based on true events from a book by Michael Lewis.
The film was written for the screen and directed by Adam McKay who is probably best known for his comedy films with Will Ferrell, those being Anchorman; Step Brothers; The Other Guys and Anchorman 2.
This film follows some experts in the finance world who have predicted the collapse of the housing market in the mid-2000s and plan to profit from the stupidity of the banks who let this happen.
We meet Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a bit of a loner but a genius, who is first to discover the unstable housing market, due to some high-risk loans the banks have agreed. Predicting the housing market will collapse bets against the banks, who are happy to accept as it is unheard of a bank to collapse.
The banks believe Burry is an eccentric idiot and think they will never lose. When Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) hears what he is doing, he believes he can invest too. When finding fellow investors, a wrong number tips off Mark Baum (Steve Carrell) a person who is already fed up with the corruption going off, so joins Vennett and bets against the banks as well.
The list of investors is added, when Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) find a copy of Vennett’s prospectus and with the help of retired trader Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) also bet against the banks.
At a financial summit, Baum meets a CDO manager, who tells him how synthetic organisations are created to make large bets against faulty loans. Baum then realises the true scale of the fraud and believes this will cause a collapse of the whole global economy and subsequently invests more believing the banks will not take any responsibility.
The collapse does indeed happen and throughout the film we have seen the lives of those the crash will affect from employees to those who face eviction from their homes.
The film could have been confusing but McKay breaks the fourth wall to bring in cameos from actors like Selena Gomez and Margot Robbie to explain what is going on.
The film is a highly powerful look into what happened and will leave you horrified how the banks let this happen. It deservedly won the best adapted screenplay Oscar for McKay and co-writer Charles Randolph. It was also nominated for best picture.
The cast are all excellent, Christian Bale was nominated for a supporting actor Oscar, but for me Carrell is simply outstanding, much like his role in Foxcatcher, he again couldn’t be further away from his Michael Scott character from the Office.
Ryan Gosling adds some humour and Brad Pitt does well to show sympathy for those that will lose everything whereas those others are clearly after the huge profits they will make.
Whereas The Wolf of Wall Street showed the benefits of making fraudulent financial deals, the Big Short shows the devastating consequences of them. This is a powerful film which retells the story of the almost global financial collapse of the economy of which some countries are still paying for now.
Was this your choice for best picture for the 2016 best picture? Do you agree Bale was the best of the cast or would you have chosen someone else in the best supporting actor category? We would love to hear from you here at Barking Mad About Films.
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