The Big Short: too funny to fail

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Smart, profane and funny, The Big Short is Hollywood’s most welcome surprise of 2015: a hugely entertaining movie about the credit-default swaps that tanked our economy at the dawn of the Obama administration. Somehow, Adam McKay (previous high watermark: Step Brothers; no, I’m serious — it’s desert-island good), directing a screenplay that he wrote with Charles Randolph, has turned the briskly told but fact-dense Michael Lewis book into a playground for highly unlike actors. Method-y Christian Bale, beard-serious Brad Pitt, a spray-tanned Ryan Gosling, a supremely dyspeptic Steve Carell — few share scenes with one another, but, under McKay’s direction (and given terrific support by familiar faces such as Max Greenfield and Hamish Linklater), they convey a super-connected chorus of bafflement and fury. Not one plays a likable person, yet the movie’s key illusion — one of brilliant casting foremost and very good acting second — is that its characters are on our side.

But what side is left to be on? Almost no one responsible for untold fiscal destruction and widespread personal calamity faced penalty, let alone prosecution. We hate the banks, hate Wall Street. We need the banks, which need Wall Street. When the movie ends, you want to find Bernie Sanders in the lobby, then go home and put up an oil painting of Paul Krugman (who this week published a column approving The Big Short on both historic and popcorn merits). You want to figure out why more people aren’t still mad, aren’t still talking all the time about the country’s worst nonviolent habits, and how those habits fire violence of a different sort, ugly and desperate — but not too ugly or desperate to laugh at, at least for a couple of hours.