It was with curiosity that I watched Adam McKay’s The Big Short, a director best known for Anchorman and its god-awful sequel, Talladega Nights, and Step Brothers. He isn’t the first director of comedy to find success in drama after the likes of Woody Allen and Ron Howard. The Big Short is hardly a leap to pure drama, neither is it a comedy, and that’s one of its core issues.

The Big Short is a true story set in the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis and follows three parties who predict the recession and short (bet against) housing stocks. In other words, they make bets that will payout big in the event of an economic crash.

Speaking of shifting towards drama, Steve Carell gives a great performance as bitter hedge fund manager Mark Baum, who is dealing with anger issues and has developed a misanthropic view of the world. He is the source of the film’s only true comedic moments, and is the most interesting character – the only one with a solid arc.

Everyone else is forgettable. Christian Bale plays a hedge fund manager with Asperger’s syndrome who predicts the crash long before anyone else. That’s about it. I think Bale deserves praise for the portrayal, but the character is dull and clichéd, with the writing actually stooping to use the phrase: “I understand numbers better than people.” Because a character with an autistic spectrum disorder has never said that before.

Even worse is Brad Pitt’s straight-faced Ben Rickert, who comes off as a failed attempt at deadpan humour. Worse still is Ryan Gosling’s likeable douche bag Jared Vennett, and for some bizarre reason this generic cardboard cut-out was front and centre as our sporadic narrator.

Let’s talk about style. I don’t believe there’s necessarily a “should and shouldn’t” list when it comes to a directorial style. Filmmakers should be free to experiment. However, a style works best when it serves the story. When it doesn’t, it comes off as gimmicky, which is what happens in The Big Short. McKay chooses hand-held cameras and close-ups that imitate a documentary format. This serves to create realism in certain scenes. It’s effective in those few moments when we realise all these horrible things actually happened, but clashes sharply with the tone of the film.

And the tone really is all over the place. Rarely will you laugh out loud, leaving most of the punch lines hanging awkwardly over a silent audience. It tries so desperately to make you laugh that you can’t immerse yourself in the story. The shift from funny to serious over the course of the entire story almost works, too. All of our characters are excited about earning “mad stacks” but in the end realise they’ve bet against the economy, and therefore the wellbeing of millions of people. But the spotty bits of comedy simply don’t work, and conflict with the realistic atmosphere created with the documentary style.

The film has some of the worst editing I’ve seen all year, proving once again that the Academy throws darts at the autumn-winter release schedule to determine the nominees. Jarring scenes and backstories are tossed around without care for tone or pacing, and disorienting jump cuts distract us during entertaining scenes like Margot Robbie in a bathtub. Oh yeah I forgot to mention, there’s a scene with Margot Robbie in a bathtub.

This brings me to my biggest criticism of The Big Short. The film is so eager to explain exactly how the economy collapsed that it gets heavily bogged down with jargon. This is often lectured directly to the audience by fourth-wall breaking and celebrity cameos. Every scene attempts to explain credit default swap markets, subprime mortgages, collateralised debt obligations, and so on. And it rarely even works. A layperson with no understanding going in would have no understanding coming out. At worst, these explanations interrupt the story to serve you something that doesn’t make sense to someone without a strong economic background, and at best, it gives us the gist but patronises us by breaking out a Jenga set or throwing a pretty face on screen.

I wanted to like this film. The subject matter – how greed destroyed the economy and ruined millions of lives – is something I can get on board with. Though it does deliver its message successfully, there’s little else that I can really praise. It isn’t funny frequently enough to be a comedy, breaks up the storytelling with too much exposition and bombed jokes to realise any dramatic substance, and wastes its talent on forgettable characters.

4-4

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