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Dec 11, 2015 By Shawn Hazelett Web Exclusive

Short selling is, by nature, a contrarian financial strategy, as it vests someone in failure of a conventionally successful product or strategy. An investor who sees a future in, say, green energy might be inclined to short an oil company. The more conventional the investment, the more profitable it is to bet against. In the mid-aughts, Wall Street’s infatuation with Mortgage Backed Securities made shorting the housing market the financial equivalent of betting on a Royal Flush. The thing is, everyone who did was right.

Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) are products founded on personal mortgage loans and legitimized by America’s most trusted credit agencies. They became so hyper valuated that it inspired an eccentric fund manager in San Jose, Michael Burry (Christian Bale), to investigate what substantiated them. The answer, quite simply, was nothing: most borrowers had extremely low credit scores and were delinquent in their payments. In some cases, borrowers had no tangible means of income. Money manager Mark Baum (Steve Carell) went a step further and investigated the lenders of these risky mortgages, learning that they specifically pawned off loans to people who simply wanted to own a home (usually, immigrants and the poor). Baum, a champion for the little guy in the face of Wall Street, decides to short MBS not just to make money but to expose the selfishness permeating through finance. However, doing so means he gets rich on the collapse of the American economy.

The Big Short allows comedy director Adam McKay a crack at the biggest farce of the millennium: one founded by a pocket of talentless, overcompensated herd-thinkers who got rich by defrauding the system and ruining an economy. Like the investing it documents, the film has no interest in convention: its fascination lies in the personalities of contrarians and in weed-whacking the double-talk of the banking system. Characters break the fourth wall to call bullshit. Celebrities are tapped in to define the MBSs, CDOs, and all the other alphabet soup that prevents discourse. Not forgotten is Steve Carell’s most nuanced performance as the aging, mad-as-hell financier whose integrity is often checked by his own sense of culpability. The Big Short is far from perfect—it could lose 15 minutes, starting with some reductive and relatively facile voiceover—but its audacity, ingenuity, and humor more than outweigh its flaws.

thebigshortmovie.com

Author rating: 8/10