Anatomy of economic language, or How they played us: The Big Short

In The Big Short, Adam McKay talks about something as complicated as the 2007 financial crisis and does it in a fast-paced but accurate way.

The story is quite simple, it's about an intuition of Michael Burry (Christian Bale), a fund manager with a glass eye affected by Aspenger syndrome.

Christian Bale as Michael Burry. Photo by Jaap Buitendijk - © 2015 Paramount Pictures Above: Opening title © 2015 Paramount Pictures

His intuition, a couple of years before the crisis, is that a market as strong as the house market wasn't so stable after all. He decides to bet money against it so that he and his investors will profit from the financial crack. Where everybody sees a crazy idea, "a few outsiders and weirdos saw what none else could", and decide to invest in it. They are Deutsche Bank trader Jared Vennet (Ryan Gosling), hedge fund manager Mark Baum (Steve Carell) and his team, and a couple of young investors (Finn Wittrock and John Magaro), helped by Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt, also the producer of this movie), a retired banker.

Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Hamish Linklater, Jeremy Strong, Rafe Spall and Jeffry Griffin. Photo by Jaap Buitendijk - © 2015 Paramount Pictures

The movie is based on the 2010 book The Big Short by investigative journalist Michael Lewis. Thanks to a very good screenplay, the story is engaging and built in such a way that we experience the same doubts and hesitations as the characters do on screen, though the 2007 crisis is recent history.

Dialogues are fast and whipping, thanks to McKay's comedy background. But here the topic is tough and McKay developes his own language behind the camera. Under attack not just the deeds of bankers who originated the crisis, but their awareness of what they were doing. "Wall Street loves to use confusing terms to make you think only they can do what they do" says Jared Vennet. So economical language, with its deliberately confusing terms, is the object of a deconstruction. With the help of a narrator, Jared, the audience gets funny delucidations, that take different shapes on screen.

Term definition on screen © 2015 Paramount Pictures

The more the passage is difficult to understand, the more improbable and out of place are the people who explain it to you, like Selena Gomez gambling in a casino or Margo Robbie in a bubble bath.

"Here's Margo Robbie in a bubble bath to explain" © 2015 Paramount Pictures

The effect is that the whole thing is disclosed, exposed, and looses its scary aura of impenetrability. At the same time, what matters has been there from the very first minute of the movie, frame after frame: people. Ordinary people, who pay their loans and see in houses their own life, their future. Those frames, that seem random, give us a bitter picture of those years, when everybody was clueless and vulnerable, so naïve.

Director: Adam McKay. Writers: Charles Randolph, Adam McKay. Cast: Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Brad Pitt, John Magaro, Finn Wittrock. Year: 2015

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