Movie: The Big Short

A dramatization of Michael Lewis's great 2010 book of the same name, about the housing bubble collapse and the arbitragers who bet both for and against it. And then leveraged their bets with Credit Default Swaps (CDOs). And then leveraged the CDOs with Synthetic Credit Default Swaps. And then bet that they were Too Big To Fail so they'd get bailed out if/when the whole thing collapsed.

The problems with the movie -- and the story it tells -- is that the financial instruments and the issues involved are so complicated, involving multiple layers of reversal, multiple layers of deception, and almost unfathomable moral ambiguity that it's incredibly hard to follow. Incredibly hard to find any Good Guys or Bad Guys. Incredibly arcane on every level.

To try to lighten the load, the movie-makers have indulged in some movie tricks like having key characters address the camera, telling viewers what's really going on and what their real motivations are. Or having a model in a bubble bath explains CDOs. Or using ridiculous gambling metaphors and charts to explain key points.

This both works, and doesn't work. It clears up some thorny issues, but at the expense of minimizing the seriousness of the whole thing. I wouldn't have wanted to be the scriptwriter, trying to explain sCDOs to the audience.

There was a cast of about two dozen, and it was hard to remember who was whom. Steve Carrell, whom I never liked as an actor, played an obnoxious self-centered prick that nobody liked, and he was perfect in that role. Brad Pitt played a reclusive ex-trader and I barely recognized him.

The film had one major failing, in my view, and that was its near-total sidestepping of the reasons the financial collapse fallout fell the way it fell. Why Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers failed, while Goldman Sachs profited. This was of course because Bernanke and Greenspan were ex-Goldman, and used the opportunity to eliminate Goldman's competition. Perhaps lawsuits were too imminent to draw that conclusion publicly. If so, shame on them.

They did at least conclude the movie by showing that nothing had changed, and Wall Street went right back to doing the exact same things immediately after the bailout. If it hadn't been quite so opaque financially, and ambiguous morally, perhaps the movie could have been a rallying cry for the 2016 elections.

As it is, I suspect too few people will be outraged and it'll sink without a trace.

My wife saw that movie last week. She said that, unfortunately, most of the people who were badly screwed and needed to watch it would not understand it.

I told her that I thought the people who needed to see it most would not bother; they were all waiting for the next Smokey and the Bandit.

Mrs NoCo saw it last week with a friend of hers, a former trader for a local arbitrage desk and she (the trader) nodded and confirmed everything.

My wife, like me, was mostly just baffled by the whole thing.