The Big Short (2015) * * *

Directed by:  Adam McKay

Starring:  Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Finn Wittrock, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Hamish Linklater, Marisa Tomei, John Magaro

There are no heroes, per se, in The Big Short.   There is the handful of guys who know what's going on and then there are the rest of the poor suckers.    I am not even referring to the average people who bought homes with shaky credit and with help from poor banking practices.   I am referring to those who profited off of those people and loans without really even knowing (or caring) that it will soon crash and burn.    Men like Dr. Michael Burry (Bale) and Jared Vennett (Gosling) predicted a housing market crash three years before it happened because they saw the numbers and extrapolated the figures out.    The rest just saw the money flowing in and just kept doing what they were doing.    They are not necessarily bad guys for doing it, just blinded.

Burry and Vennett, along with hedge funders Mark Baum (Carell) and a few others saw the future.    How did they respond?    They "bet against" the market by taking out bond insurance policies against the shaky mortgage loans.     These policies or "shorts" did not exist prior, but were instead created with their own rules.    If the loans fail, the banks pay the policy holders a lot of money.    Until they fail, the policy holders had to pay a lot of money in premiums to the banks.    The banks happily conducted the transactions, and why not?    They did not see the bubble was soon to burst.    They did not even know there was a bubble.    They saw this as yet another way to make easy money. 

Based on the book by Moneyball writer Michael Lewis, The Big Short begins in 2005 with socially awkward hedge fund operator Burry studying default trends and predicting a terrifying outcome.    Because the banks became lax in their loan approval processes and with interest rates soon to skyrocket, many homeowners will default on their mortgages and lose their homes.    Many of these people should never have received home loans in the first place, but the banks found ways to bundle up these loans with good loans and sell these bundles to other banks.    So why not keep up essentially giving away home loans?   

The Big Short shows the housing market, which infamously crashed in 2008 and caused the world economy to enter a tailspin, was built on a foundation of sand.    It was a high-risk, temporarily high profit house of cards.    The reason the prophets like Burry, Vennett, or Baum are not heroes is because they discovered a new way to profit from this.    Sure, it exposed the financial industry's idiocy for what it was, but they still profited from others' misfortune.    Baum, played with ferocity and self-righteous anger by Carell, decided to buy the shorts partly to say "I told you so" to the amoral finance industry.    But in the end, he still walked away with $200 million.    That is not exactly the most painful way to earn a living.  

We know through history what will happen.    We can not look away.    We see get-rich-quick money lenders gleefully telling anyone who will listen how easily they sign up people with crappy credit scores for loans they can no way afford.     "Why are they confessing?" Baum asks his associate.   "They are not confessing, they're bragging," his associate replies.    And he's correct.   
Sooner or later, such lenders find themselves attending job fairs applying for jobs at IKEA.

The Big Short takes a bitter, angry, satirical look at the banking industry.    It knows how silly the rules are and we do also.    Thankfully, McKay uses cameos by Margot Robbie, Selena Gomez, and chef Anthony Bourdain to explain to us what exactly a sub-prime loan is.    The message comes across more smoothly when Robbie is explaining while submerged in a bubble bath.    Characters break the fourth wall often to tell the audience what they are doing and why.    The one who does this the most often is Vennett, played by Gosling with equal amounts vapidity, arrogance, and of course knowing what the hell he's talking about.     We can more identify with Baum and Burry, who do their best in their own awkward, uncomfortable, human way to warn others about what they know.    And also to get a piece of the action.   Why?   Because they knew down deep that no one will learn from what happened.   

Nobody learned anything the Stock Market crashes of 1929 and 1988 or The Great Depression.     The financial industries simply apply the old methods in newer, high-tech ways and create even more complex schemes that will ultimately fail.    The chickens always come home to roost.    History proves that time and again.     It is the textbook definition of insanity, which is doing the same wrong thing over and over expecting different results.    

The Big Short, which almost functions like a documentary, is not a warning or a historical document.   It is a mirror.