Adam McKay | 130 mins | streaming (HD) | 2.35:1 | USA / English | 15 / R
You wouldn’t think the 2008 financial crisis would make good fodder for a comedy-drama — it’s both too complicated and too grim — but Anchorman writer-director Adam McKay clearly felt differently. With co-writer Charles Randolph, he adapted the non-fiction bestseller by Michael Lewis (the author of the books that became awards season contenders The Blind Side and Moneyball) and turned it into… well, an awards season contender — but a funny one.
Specifically, it’s the story of the handful of men who saw the financial crisis coming, and arranged their finances to bet on it, too. It’s not a completely true account but, as it’s presented here, Michael Burry (Christian Bale) is the only one who actually spots it. He takes out insurance policies or something — look, the whole film is full of really complicated financial stuff and this was right at the start, OK? Here’s the Wikipedia plot description of what he does: “his plan is to create a credit-default swap market, allowing him to bet against market-based mortgage-backed securities.” So, he does that, the investment banks gladly accept his money because they think he’s mad, but a handful of others (including Ryan Gosling, Steve Carell, and Brad Pitt) stumble across his research one way or another, believe he’s right, and begin to make similar investments.
The narrative is laden with concepts that are so complicated even people within the industry don’t properly understand all of them (however did the market fail?!), but the movie nonetheless attempts to explain them in an accessible way. It’s half successful: you kind of understand them at the time, about enough to follow along, but the chances of remembering them later are next to naught. One of McKay’s tricks to engage us with these explanations is to wheel in random celebrities to deliver analogies. It’s a fun idea, though it’s success is debatable — I mean, I’ve just about heard of Selena Gomez, and I guess the “famous chef” that turns up must have a TV show in America, or something, maybe? Yeah, the ‘names’ he’s chosen are going to date this movie far more than its 2008 setting ever will.
Indeed, on the whole I could’ve done without McKay’s jittery directorial style, amped up through ADD editing by Hank Corwin. Both were Oscar nominated and I’ve read other reviews that praise the style, but to me it just felt needlessly hyperactive, like the film is so afraid of being dull that it has to constantly dance around in the hope you won’t notice. I did notice — not that the film was dull, just that it thought it was. I guess that’s what happens when a guy more at home making movies like Anchorman and The Other Guys instead makes one about the world of real-life high finance.
Though the conceptual explanations may fade almost as soon as you’ve heard them, what does stick with you is how it all ends. Essentially, the financial industry that destroyed peoples’ lives in pursuit of never-ending profit not only got away with it, but they actually started doing the same stuff all over again, just with new acronyms. What’s even more sickening is that people are clearly aware it’s going on — I mean, we’ve been told as much in an Oscar-winning movie — but they’re still doing nothing about it.
How’s that for a scary thought this Halloween weekend, eh?
100Films.co.uk 