The Big Short

Steve Carell in The Big Short

Adam McKay's The Big Short is a diverting, if somewhat shallow, look at some of the "winners" of the 2008 financial meltdown. McKay pictures the parallel stories of three investors who scored by betting the the US housing market would implode. McKay has been previously known as a director of comedies, chiefly Anchorman. He brings a bit of comic flair and razzmatazz to juice up what could have been a deadly earnest docu-drama in other hands.

McKay interjects such media luminaries as Anthony Bourdain and Selena Gomez into the mix to give us light-hearted lessons into the intricacies of  subprime mortgages and the like. This, and other techniques, help the film zip along its merry way, but McKay's loose control of his players and his pedestrian mise en scene ultimately detract from his attempt to make a black comic screed about the state of US banking.

Ryan Gosling and Christian Bale are more than fine, as usual, as two of the main leads. Given his previous films, it seems that McKay likes to give his players a lot of leeway and I think he gave Steve Carell a too much here. Carell is made for uptight roles, but resorts to bombast here playing an obnoxious hedge fund manager haunted by the suicide of his brother. Carell is the only main character given a spouse or friend to help flesh his character, in this case a wife played by the always welcome Marisa Tomei. Bale has an offscreen wife whose voice is heard once and Gosling is seemingly unencumbered. This would all be fine if McKay was able to get an emotional payoff from the time spent on Carell's background, but when the emotional floodgates are supposed to open, as Carell's character finally listens to his wife and opens up about his feelings (a cliché for male characters in recent movies), the effect is negligible. McKay has endeavored to suggest that this character, beneath his bluster and sociopathic tendencies, is deeply concerned with the economic havoc he has helped wrought, but the moment still falls flat. 

McKay's objective camera never taps into his characters' feelings. Brad Pitt's character is, we are told, so disgusted with the financial sector that he has rejected modern society and gone to live off the grid, but we never actually see this. No context is provided for either Pitt's or Carrell's performance. McKay, like a lot of directors, overuses close-ups and this reduces Pitt's efforts to uncharismatic insularity and Carell's to bluster and an array of tics. Similarly, the film's settings are undifferentiated. The lowly hedge fund offices don't seem ratty and tatty enough compared to the big boys. Such a lack of attention to detail doesn't mean much when framing lowbrow farces such as Anchorman and Step Brothers, but The Big Short deserved better. (7/8/16)