Watching
the trailer for this best picture nominee, I was getting slight American Hustle vibes. In the film’s opening moments, I saw shades
of The Wolf of Wall Street. Ultimately, though, it that stands quite well
on its own and doesn’t need comparisons.
This film is its own animal, and it does a fairly difficult job with a
lot of skill, humor, and creativity.
In the
years leading up to the housing crisis of 2008, there are those who see the
writing on the wall and ready themselves to profit from the crash. Even as everyone insists that real estate is
bulletproof, a handful of men start buying “shorts” on mortgage bonds,
essentially betting against the housing market.
Part opportunists, part investigators, and part Cassandra from Greek
mythology, they get a picture of just how deep the behind-the-scenes corruption
goes.
After
seeing this movie, I feel like I actually kind of understand the convoluted
financial shell-gaming that was going on at this time. The film does a phenomenal job explaining the
basics of mortgage bonds and shorts for laymen, and what’s more, it does it entertainingly. Fourth-wall-breaking devices guide us through
the bank talk, including voiceover narration, asides to the camera, and a few
winking “Here’s celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain to explain all this CDO
business…” detours. This tells us what
we need to know without grinding the movie to a halt. Our main voiceover man, Big Bank d-bag Jared,
acknowledges that even thinking about mortgage bonds probably makes us feel
bored or stupid, which is just the way the banks like it. (I also really like it when the fourth wall
is broken to comment on the true-story aspect of the piece – for example, when
Jared interrupts an especially-crazy moment to assure us that “that really
happened!” or when small-time investors Jamie and Charlie takes some time out
to explain that an implausibly-neat transition was in fact fabricated for
narrative fluidity. It reminds me a
little of the kind of stuff Tom Stoppard does in a lot of his historical
works.)
The
acting is fantastic, although given the way the trailer loses its mind over the
cast, that’s no surprise. The standouts
are supporting-actor-nominated Christian Bale as the brilliant outside-the-box
thinker Michael (I should point out that Michael is an Aspie, and Bale’s
depiction of that feels very lived-in and naturalistic) and Steve Carell as
Mark, a jaded idealist with anger management issues. The film also features Brad Pitt and a very
funny Ryan Gosling, along with the terrific Hamish Linklater, Max Greenfield
(what’s this New Girl you speak
of? he’s still Deputy Leo from Veronica Mars to me,) Melissa Leo, and
Karen Gillan.
As
great as the movie is, though, it’s kind of a hard one. Seeing the characters plant the seeds for
their future big payoff, you can’t help but remember that they’re banking on
the collapse of the housing market and all the turmoil that went with it. Yes, they’re the underdogs profiting off of
the banks’ greed, fraudulence, and outright stupidity, but in the end, we know
that the banks got their golden parachutes while millions of people lost their
homes, jobs, and/or savings. The film does
address this conflict, but I was still pulled out of it a few times just to
feel disgusted at the characters for recognizing such a broken system and only
looking to profit from it.
Warnings
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