Recencies van critici

I liked the movie. A lot. I laughed – a lot. I also cried inside. The film is that complicated thing, a tragi-comedy. Its co-writer and director, Adam McKay, breaks the ‘fourth wall' of movie-making not just by allowing characters to speak to camera; not just by insisting on ‘telling' as well as ‘showing' (which apparently movie schools prohibit) but also by refusing to patronise his audience.

Playing to McKay's proven strengths, the actors portray antisocial rogues, whose many aesthetic and interpersonal faux pas score many of the film's early laughs. This could be viewed as yet another decision to pander, but in its performances The Big Short finds its unlikely pathos. This is not despite the celebrity baggage of its world-famous leads, but because of it.

Even though McKay gives the impression he is using recognizable forms of infotainment to educate us, the film doesn't do that—it's barely in the form of a movie. This disrespect is what makes The Big Short so satisfying. It jeers at and burlesques Wall Street for letting the crash happen, using Michael Lewis's book to show there were people who knew it was going to happen. Its slapdash quality reinforces the idea that it needed to be made.

What looks like an unlikely path to respectability for writer-director Adam McKay is actually a logical extension of his subversive talents. McKay has always been smart about being dumb, ever since co-founding the improvisational comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade, right on through his sneakily satiric features with Ferrell. And what could be dumber—and more ripe for subversive scrutiny—than the market-bubble demolition of the U.S. economic infrastructure?

There's nothing seamless about its combining fact with fiction, information and entertainment—in fact it's often supremely awkward. But there's honesty and ethical sincerity emerging from those seams, which ultimately makes the film more trustworthy than entitled assertions about artistic license or reportorial privilege.

It's more like a fictional version of an Alex Gibney film than it is a fictional version of a Michael Moore film. There's at least a pretense of moral objectivity here. The film toys discreetly with its documentary roots by having cinematographer Barry Ackroyd lend the patina of crash-zoom verité to proceedings which have been unashamedly fictionalised, and the decision to work in this fashion is one of the film's more fascinating and radical decisions.

Financial jargon is puzzling, in fact it's deliberately puzzling says someone in The Big Short – a densely packed, grimly funny semi-comedy that plays like an older, more responsible brother to The Wolf of Wall Street – being a form of obfuscation that allows the banks to operate beyond the ken of ordinary people (including those with money invested in them). ‘How could this have happened?' is the underlying question as the film shows a country in the grip of financial insanity.

The Anchorman/Step Brothers director indulges a fair amount of his occasional-energy, no-discipline bro comedy, a smokescreen to maintain viewer interest rather than an attempt to connect malefactors' actions and their larger behavioural climate. Most irritatingly, he uses a number of montages to convey time's passage, in which random-ish clips are weighted about equally and leadenly with ironic pop cuts.

The Big Short is the truth-telling picture of the year. It puts beautifully shaded characters in guy comedy mode into an Altman-esque narrative, shot counter to type by Ken Loach's cinematographer, Barry Ackroyd. As a morally complex piece, it's light years beyond Spotlight, a paint-by-numbers template stolen from All the President's Men that rewards its audience with a multiplex-friendly victory.

McKay, who co-wrote the screenplay with Charles Randolph, is terrified that viewers might be confused or bored, so he keeps stopping the film to have guest celebrities (Margot Robbie, Anthony Bourdain, Selena Gomez) define terms like "collateralized debt obligation" directly to the camera—a ploy that's funny at first but soon begins to feel condescending.

McKay's gimmicks shouldn't land as well as they do, but the film succeeds because its indignation is righteous and earned... Its method of pedagogy may be too acerbic for some tastes, but maybe that's what people need in this instance: to be rudely shaken awake.

Understanding the technicalities does not make it more or less of a crime, nor the lack of consequences for those responsible more or less egregious. What it does do is take up space that might have otherwise been devoted to more interesting ideas, like just whatever it was these profiteers planned to do with their ill-won loot, or maybe why they didn't just go to the press in the first place. McKay merely seems interested in complaining that you aren't as mad as he is.