With the right approach and wording, it is technically possible to make a comedy
about pretty much anything. As much as I’ve gone on about how there are some
things that should always be treated seriously, even those rather taboo
subjects can be made funny in the right hands. And then you have today’s film,
a comedic drama about the global financial crisis, as directed by Will Ferrell’s
right-hand man Adam McKay. Trust me, whatever initial ideas you may have about
this kind of feature as made by the guy who made Anchorman, you’re on the wrong
track. So, time to look into some Dennis Miller brand esoterica that,
apparently, the Academy has gotten behind… yeah, I’ll let you know when that
statement actually means something around here.
The plot: Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a hedge fund
manager on Wall Street, has discovered that the U.S. housing market is on the
brink of collapse within the next few years. Over the next several months,
other financial minds such as Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), Mark Baum (Steve
Carell), Charlie Geller (John Margaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) come
to a similar conclusion. They all decide, by their own methods, to make some
major income off of the short-sightedness of the banks and bet against the house, only it seems that not
even the banks are playing by their own rules any more.
It’s a definite joy to see an ensemble cast pull this much
individual weight with their performances. Gosling is the kind of absolute
arsehole character who is so much of a prick that he actually breaks the fourth
wall with how bad he is… no, seriously, there is a scene where he actively lies
to the audience; in lesser hands, this would’ve been a complete vacuum of
enjoyment. Instead, he probably makes for the most engaging character in the
film. Steve Carell, who is ultimately the main character for the majority of
the film, brings back that bombastic hijacking of every scene that he used to
mild effect in Freeheld, and turns it into something truly captivating to
watch. I doubt many actors can get away with barging into a work meeting, rant
for several minutes and then just leave on a personal phone call and still making the character likeable.
Magaro and Wittrock are both very capable everymen and have some pretty decent
chemistry with Brad Pitt, who is pretty much fulfilling his producer duties in
what is a glorified cameo. Hey, I’ll take it over his last role any day. In
terms of straight-up acting, all the points go to Bale however. While he gets
across the neurotic intellect all well and good, his subtleties with portraying
his false eye are definitely worth commending. Getting those eye twitches down
as well as they are in this film must’ve been hell but, then again, it would’ve
been a cake walk compared to his previous body-twisting bits of method.
This is an irrevocably thick screenplay, filled with Wall
Street terminology that can feel like chewing through a slab of concrete just
to get to the crux of the conversation. Now, normally I would condemn a film
that isn’t able to properly translate its wording for its audience; however, I
hold back on this for two reasons. One, they actually do explain the more important details, even reducing one down to
just being ‘shit’; instant points for that one. And two, the fact that the
terminology is so anti-layman actually ends up working to the film’s advantage.
Early on, the audience is told that these terms are indeed confusing and
they’re meant to be confusing; it
highlights how the financial crisis managed to happen without more people
noticing it. It’s like the fine print on the iTunes Terms & Conditions: If
you actually get through all the obtuse wording and obfuscation, then you’d realise that they are specifically asking you not to hold them accountable for extremely bizarre situations like if
their technology is used for the production of chemical or biological weapons.
Yes, seriously.
The anti-layman attitude is eased through the audience’s
attention spans through how the film is presented. Something tells me that
Carell signed onto this film because some part of him misses working on The
Office because a lot of it carries that same mockumentary tone. The editing,
the intentionally-shoddy camera work complete with awkward zooms and
re-focusing, the near-constant breaking of the fourth wall; it all has that
sense of the familiar about it. Of course, it feeling familiar doesn’t
automatically make it bad; on the contrary, as these out-of-film moments make
up some of its funniest scenes. Whether it’s Gosling explaining or
intentionally misrepresenting the events of the film, Geller and Shipley
detailing how a key moment in the film occurred differently in real life, or
just the random celebrities that are brought in to help explain the financial
words that affect the plot the most (“Here’s Selena Gomez to help explain”, for
instance), this film gets crafty with its presentation. Not that the film is
completely screwball like this, as one of its more disarmingly nice touches is
the way that it acknowledges one of the easiest jokes of the subject matter
(the suicide rate of bankers) and clips its wings immediately through the
introduction of a character related to one of the mains. I won’t spoil it here,
but it makes for probably the most emotionally gripping part of the film.
There are films that have good soundtracks, that are good at utilising those soundtracks, and then
there’s those that reach the point where they deserve genuine respect for one
reason or another. For the first instance outside of an Evan Goldberg
production, we have a film that does all three. Let’s start with the easy
point: Having a scene set to Kelis’ Milkshake that doesn’t instantly make me
want to throw up is an achievement all on its own, probably helped by how it
features Carell doing some amazing facial expressions while conversing with a
stripper. There’s the sequence featuring Ludacris’ Money Maker that is
surprisingly pitch perfect in intent and delivery, the constant metal music
coming out of Burry’s office that never ceased to bring some form of joy when
in conjunction with Bale’s performance, and then there’s the piece of music
used when the setting shifts to Vegas. It’s a mash-up of The Phantom Of The
Opera, Blockbuster Night Pt. 1 by Run The Jewels and a cover of That’s Life… I…
I have no words. As a means of portraying the sudden feeling of anxiety at just
how bro-y these bankers that are running the world really are, it is just about
the best that any human being could have possibly put together.
All in all, for all the credit I give this film when it
comes to its comedic timing, excellent cast, use of soundtrack and absorbingly
unorthodox style, we’re still talking about an extremely exclusive subject
matter that could possibly leave a lot of viewers in the dark. Still, even
further credit is due in that this might be the first time in a long time where
a film’s incomprehensibility actually worked somewhat to its advantage.
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