REVIEW: The Big Short (2016)

Adam McKay may seem like a strange filmmaker to opt for an awards season biopic of the beginnings of the global economic meltdown of 2008, given his previous form as the director of Anchorman, Step Brothers and The Other Guys. Though it is clearly something close to his heart (remember the serious animated lecture that acted as an appendix to the not-awful The Other Guys), can a filmmaker like McKay pull off something so dense and complicated and, yes, serious.

The Big Short, a title that recalls more The Big Easy or The Big Lebowski than The Big Sleep, is about a few (all-male) groups who saw evidence of a housing bubble and who bet against the seemingly rock-solid housing market, reaping millions as millions lose homes and jobs. We have Michael Burry (a largely restrained Christian Bale), a solo financial wizard, who first sees the inevitable collapse due to the precarious way in which all of the banks had tied their money and capital up in potentially worthless mortgage bonds. His plan inspires others including Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) and Mark Baum (a quite good Steve Carell), who all tie up their funds in betting against the housing market.

The film traces the risks that these characters take, the pitfalls and the dark moments in which bankruptcy looms before the ultimate pay-off. Here, particularly in the Burry storyline, the film is closest to that other Michael Lewis adaptation, Moneyball, about the lone innovator who takes a serious risk and ends up triumphant and vindicated in the end. All fine with baseball (though that film was rather dull), but more troubling in the case of The Big Short. The film’s primary focus is on these financial traders who saw the fall coming and bet on it, making a quick buck in the process, which is not the greatest angle from which to address the serious greed and avarice that led to the economic collapse that ruined lives. The film does sort-of address this upside-down morality with Baum having doubts about what he has done, but ultimately the film strives to get an underdog triumph storyline out of something that can only be negative, if not fully misanthropic. Surely that misses the point about what this purely-financial collapse ought to represent.

The film does try to offer a serious critique of what brought about the collapse and the leniency of the response of the world’s governments. There is a running sense of disbelief at the stupidity of the bankers (how did they not know that this was going to happen? Did they really think this kind of policy was going to be sustainable?), that is nicely countered when we hear from Baum about the government’s bailouts, i.e. they knew that there were doing damage, but they were confident that the taxpayer would foot the bill and so simply didn’t care. The film does rouse your indignation, possibly even more effectively than the too-often misunderstood The Wolf of Wall Street. However, the film is not enough of a sustained critique. Though it will inspire a new ire in people who find the news boring, it is just not serious enough, working too hard to be an entertainment with heroes, an underdog storyline and a damaging, slightly desperate comedic strain that does it no favours. So we have Margot Robbie in a hot tub and Selena Gomez playing blackjack to explain CDO’s, stupid jokes that are wholly out of place and stupid pop culture montages. McKay seems to believe that too serious a critique will only confuse and irritate audiences, so he has tried to make the film as entertaining as possible, but it only makes it look foolish, hysterical and jumpy. Sadly, the filmmakers simply do not have enough trust in their material.

And that is it. The Big Short is a story of the outsider vindicated, which severely misses the point; it largely avoids the darker side to this story (the homelessness, the poverty) in favour of out-of-place comedy and easy pokes at villainy and greed; it lacks the intellectual heft to truly tackle its subject. It may be a good primer for the initiated, but with its hot tubs and poker games, it may feel like an insult to one’s intelligence. Though given how the collapse came about and the ease with which a stunning critique like The Wolf of Wall Street can be taken as a celebration and an inspiration, maybe that is what we deserve.

REVIEW: The Ides of March (2011)

  The Ides of March displays a sense of recent post-Obama disillusionment and largely deals with the loss of a young political advisor’s ideals and the impossibility of making worthwhile change in the current political system. It also pleasingly harks back to the brilliant The Best Man and Advise and Consent.

  Ryan Gosling plays Stephen Meyers, press secretary to Governor Mike Morris (played by George Clooney, who also directs), an apparently sincere Democratic and Obama surrogate.  Meyers believes that Morris is the best man to run the country, precisely because he is honest and committed to doing the right thing. However, as the race for a presidential nomination heats up, Meyers’ beliefs and ideals blow up in his face as he comes across dirty secrets and corrupt backroom deals.

  To the wary eye, trained on Armando Iannucci’s scathing and hilarious The Thick of It and its spin-off In The Loop, Meyers’ idealism seems entirely naïve and Gosling’s performance slightly unbelievable. The Ides of March initially seems like it might be a silly though sincere attempt to persuade a jaded audience that politics is good and that it works. Which is why it is really rather effective when it becomes a bleak movie about the impossibility of good coming from within the current system. Though it doesn’t go to the extremes of Iannucci, who can get a bit depressing at his most powerful, The Ides of March is surprisingly glum, especially for a Hollywood movie, and even has moments of wry satire. Unlike The Rum Diary, there is no third-act redemption to undercut the power of its critique.

  That said, it remains a Hollywood movie. The film is saddled with a few creaky plot manoeuvres and constantly threatens to wrong-foot itself, most awkwardly in the figure of Evan Rachel Wood. Her character becomes little more than a plot point after a rather good start, something the film’s odd conclusion seems to apologize for. At the film’s end, an intern is introduced with the aim of exposing their casual exploitation during a political campaign. This is an odd criticism in a film that deals with much more serious forms of corruption and much more so in a film that also exploits the intern to develop its convoluted plot.

  Another problem lies in the film’s rather disappointing move from sober political drama into a somewhat overblown political thriller. After a confident though befuddled beginning, Gosling reverts to The Driver and is given to brooding and walking down corridors with a stone face. The thriller elements are what threaten a descent into silliness, which, admittedly, the film does manage to largely avoid. However, it is hard to believe that politics can be this exciting and devious in the real world. Iannucci gets away with it because he uses exaggeration for the purposes of comedy. A seemingly realistic film like The Ides of March can’t help but look over the top if it exaggerates.

  It is a mark of a film having worked when, if it stumbles, you are genuinely worried for it. The Ides of March, despite its flaws, manages to create enough good will to see it through to the end. Though it may be unsure about what tone to take, it remains a surprisingly biting, if not angry, film with mostly great performances, especially Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman. As well as that, it has a point to make and, for once, it makes it well.

REVIEW: Drive (2011)

  Drive is a gritty neo-noir based on a sparse James Sallis book, which successfully harks back not only to the film noir of the 1940s, but also the existential road movies of the 1970s, such as Walter Hill’s The Driver. But does it live up to either tradition?

  Ryan Gosling plays the unnamed Driver, a movie stuntman and occasional getaway driver. He lives a lonely and uncomplicated existence, until he meets Irene (Carey Mulligan), a woman who lives down the hall. Her husband is in jail, so Driver keeps her and her young son company. A romance seems to begin until Irene’s husband (Oscar Isaac) comes home and the two men become embroiled in an increasingly murderous heist.

  Drive is a slow, somewhat meditative film with a lot of time spent lingering on Driver’s impassive face. When the car chases come, the pace speeds up, delivering some reasonably exciting action sequences. Director Nicolas Winding Refn, of Pusher and Bronson fame, has adopted the high-speed camerawork of Quentin Tarantino’s turgid Death Proof, such that the camera always keeps up with the chases. There is never a steady shot of the cars flying by – we remain with them the whole time. As a result, Drive is breezy and undemanding entertainment, but unfortunately the film has several flaws.

  Most noticeable is the painfully trite and corny romance storyline, which aims at being subtly moving, but ends up being distractingly coy. It is the film’s main weak point and it isn’t helped by Mulligan’s rather servile performance. It seems as if Refn wants to delve more into her character, to make her appear to be more than just a plot device, but has absolutely no idea how to. As a result, the film has several scenes in which Mulligan sits around or looks in a mirror as if watching her doing nothing will somehow create instant understanding and empathy in the audience. Worse, her quiet scenes in front of mirrors haunt the rest of the film’s slow paced sequences. Gosling (not much better) does the same staring-outwards-with-a-brooding-expression stuff as well, and it comes to feel like character shorthand.

  The film gets much more violent in its second half as things become more complicated. But in every bloody murder scene, Refn allows the film’s cool veneer to slip and he goes into overdrive, shooting bleeding wounds from all sorts of angles and with several close-ups. Ultimately, the film starts to feel like a cartoon. It’s not that Drive is too violent, it is just that it gets too excited by it’s own violence and loses its cool. One scene involving a fork and another involving an exploding head in slow-motion are so overdone that it looks like a bad Hostel sequel, which is absolutely not the tone that Refn aimed for in the rest of the film. Eventually, it comes to feel that Refn was only being slow paced to begin with because he wasn’t interested about the non-violent scenes.

  Drive is a moody and believable film with an almost perfect modern day pulp feel, but it lets itself down by being very lazy with the romance subplot and by being too giddy during its many murder scenes.