Adam McKay makes financial jargon funny without making the greed behind it harmless. The Big Short is an angry, absorbing comedy, though its constant interruptions occasionally suggest it trusts the audience less than it should.
Adam McKay makes a financial-crisis comedy in which understanding the deal is part of the entertainment. The people betting against the market give us somebody to follow, although their wager makes uncomplicated cheering difficult. The Big Short is funny, absorbing and worth the effort its terminology demands, with a nagging habit of explaining something and then checking that we have understood. Its anger usually earns its place because the script takes the trouble to explain what these people stand to gain.
Screenwriters Adam McKay and Charles Randolph treat the financial vocabulary as something a comedy can use, rather than an obstacle to be hurried past. Characters address the camera, celebrities supply explanations, and a Jenga tower helps explain the risk. We laughed at that demonstration, then felt uneasy about how much we enjoyed it. Reducing the wager to a tabletop game makes it graspable. It also makes it easy to forget, for a moment, that the stakes extend beyond the men placing the bet.
Christian Bale gives Michael Burry a fragility that helps the character survive the film’s fondness for eccentricity. We can follow his concentration without being asked to admire every oddity, and the performance holds our attention even when the film is busy showing off elsewhere. Steve Carell’s Mark Baum provides a more combustible presence, giving the anger a human source instead of leaving it all to the script. Ryan Gosling’s Jared Vennett supplies some welcome comic ease amid the more strenuous performances. None needs to be made admirable for the scenes to work.
Barry Ackroyd’s restless cinematography keeps the exchanges from settling into a comfortable procession of explanations. The camera’s agitation suits people who think faster than they listen, though there are times when a steadier look would make a complicated point easier to follow. Hank Corwin’s editing works in the same impatient spirit, cutting the lectures into a comedy rhythm. The jolts are often funny, but their frequency can start to feel automatic, as if a quiet passage might be mistaken for a failure.
Clayton Hartley’s production design is sensibly unobtrusive, leaving the actors plenty of room to make these financial dealings look absurd. The setting feels credible without demanding the attention that the camera movements and interruptions do. Nicholas Britell’s music offers some relief from the more insistent comic rhythms. That restraint helps, because the film already has enough people competing to tell us how extraordinary all this is.
The irritation is that the film sometimes mistakes our need for information for an inability to pay attention. A fourth-wall interruption can clarify a transaction; several in succession can make us feel that we are being hurried through it. The broad character quirks also mean that a few people register more quickly than they deepen. At 131 minutes, the repetition takes some of the force out of a technique that works well when used selectively.
A financial satire needs to make the business interesting enough for the jokes to matter, and this one does. We are allowed to understand why a bet is tempting, and to feel the discomfort of finding it tempting ourselves. That is enough to forgive some overemphatic teaching. Watch it with someone who will want to argue about the men placing those bets.
