The Big Short...how soon is too soon?

At first glance the man who gave us such latter day comedy classics as Anchorman and Talledega Nights might be an odd choice for this polemic about the financial crash but Adam McKay has some form in this area. Five years ago I was jolted out of my inattention to his The Other Guys – a pretty routine low comedy as far as I was concerned – by an end credits sequence of savage wit about the state of the US economy after the financial crash of 2008.

The essence of the sequence, which you can see here, is that the rich get rich and the rest get shafted. Anyway this was evidently more than a bee in his bonnet and McKay has gone on to make a film which excoriates the 1% and provides a degree of sardonic comedy along the way. It is now the Oscar front-runner and I think deservedly so simply for standing up and saying what it does. That it also happens to be a dazzling dark comedy is an added bonus.

It’s the accepted wisdom that no one saw the financial crash coming but in fact lots of people did. It wasn’t like a plane crash that genuinely happens without warning, there were lots of signs and quite a few people saw them. In some respects this is like the disaster movie where some Cassandra of a scientist tells everyone the earthquake is coming or the volcano will erupt. Except, unlike the guy in the white coat who is generally the first victim as he heroically attempts to warn others, these guys got obscenely rich.

This is a moral question on which this film comes up, you’ll forgive the expression, short. They see it coming but rather than warn everyone they sit back and make money, all the while marvelling at what everyone else is getting away with.

They make their cash through a process known as ‘shorting’, which is essentially betting against the market. You are betting on a crash which you have seen coming and, despite a brief homily from Brad Pitt about the impact of a crash on ordinary people, they make shedloads of money. It’s a brutal economic instrument which can bring down companies and trash whole economies.

This is the film’s biggest problem; it has no heroes. There is no one you can really root for, we are in a world not of goodies and baddies but baddies and worsies. Our protagonists are no angels, what honour they have comes from at least acknowledging what they’re doing.

But The Big Short isn’t about these guys; hedge fund manager Christian Bale, Wall Street wolf Ryan Gosling, investment boss Steve Carrell, and small time investors Jahn Magaro and Finn Wittrock. It is a film about a corrupt system which relies on the fact that only a few people, in the words of F.Scott Fitzgerald, have the whole equation and they are piling in.

It is a system so corrupt that it is almost impenetrable to the outsider. At one point our unreliable narrator Ryan Gosling breaks the fourth wall to assure us of something we had suspected, that the previous ten minutes is incomprehensible.

The reassurance is the key to The Big Short’s success. The dazzling terminology of the financial sector obscures what everyone does. McKay deals with this very cleverly if simplistically – Margo Robbie in a bubble bath explaining credit default swaps? It’s more entertaining than Robert Peston doing it. But in doing so McKay gets away from what’s happening to concentrate on what’s going on.

The message of the film is simple. These people got away with the crime of the century – any century – and not only were they not held to account, we actually helped them to do it. The only appropriate response to large sections of this film is open-mouthed astonishment at what was going on in plain sight.

That’s why the only appropriate way to tell this story is as a comedy, because sooner or later we realise that the joke was, and continues to be, on us.