by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright December 2015
I found The Big Short confusing in places, but overall entertaining. The confusion is not too surprising. It is grappling with a finance topic that is still not well understood and still causes heated arguments, and there are many, many people moving on and off the screen -- this is not a simple, familiar story. The interesting part is how the story portrays these finance contrarians and their emotions when the bubble burst didn't happen on the schedule they were expecting.
The movie is telling the story of three different groups of fund managers who, each in their own way, in the mid-2000's, decide the housing market is in a bubble, and what they do to confirm their discovery and take advantage of it.
(I can sympathize entirely because I too noticed the housing market was acting strangely in the 2000's (and the whole economy, for that matter) and I too was trying to figure out how to take advantage of my insight. I didn't come up with anything special. Instead, this is when I became acutely aware of how important timing is on something like this, and how hard that part is to forecast. And in 2007/8 the surprise for me was how big and far-flung the crash became. I had been expecting something for a couple years, but something much smaller.)
The interesting part for me was near the end of the movie, when all three groups are frustrated because the bubble they see won't burst in the way they think it should, and how the movie portrays their response to this frustration. (I chuckled a bit at the irony of their frustration. These people are contrarians -- going against the flow -- and they still want the world to follow their schedule.)
Their response is to blame crooks for keeping the bubble afloat, not ignorance or surprise. This is a conclusion I disagree with, but I can see where it comes from. This is the "Blame Them" instinct (my term) looking for a way to express itself as these people get both scared and frustrated. They get scared because they have a lot of their own money, and other people's money, bet on their contrarian choice. They express their frustration as a conspiracy theory -- this answer resonates well with story telling. The good news is the screen writers don't push this criminal conspiracy idea very hard, they do a good job of keeping uncertainty and surprise as a big part of the story mix.
This movie covers an interesting time in history. It is one that is more complex than typical movie stories try to handle. I'm real happy to see this attempt make it to the big screen. We need more of this.
The actors do a good job of portraying their characters. So all-in-all, this is a movie worth watching.
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