Megastars Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale and Steve Carell united in the same film? It’s for “The Big Short: The Heist of the Century”, a biting comedy about the subprime crisis! Available on Netflix.
A caustic comedy about the subprime financial crisis that shook the subprime mortgage sector in the United States? It’s possible ! In 2015, American director Adam McKay succeeded in this daring bet with the brilliant The Big Short: The Heist of the Century, led by a magical quartet composed of Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale and Steve Carell.
Available on Netflix, The Big Short: The Heist of the Century, big screen adaptation of the best-seller The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis, tells how four outsiders, taking advantage of the general blindness of big banks, the media and the government, anticipated the explosion of the financial bubble. Their objective ? Pull off the heist of the century by betting against the banks.
With his book, the novelist Michael Lewis, to whom we also owe the work Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game which inspired the film The Strategist, is interested not in investors who lost a lot following the subprime crisis, but in a handful of antisocial geeks who had bet on a historic failure of the real estate market in the United States.
“They are the ones who took The Heist of the Century from a magazine article to an investigative book”says Michael Lewis. “The guys who bet against the banks and made fortunes – those were the people I was interested in.”
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This behind-the-scenes look at the economic crisis immediately appealed to the director Adam McKayuntil now confined to the register of pure comedy (Ricky Bobby: king of the circuit, Brothers in spite of them…). “I started reading one evening around 10:30 p.m. thinking, “I’m going to read 40 pages””he declares. “I couldn’t put the book down. I finished it early in the morning.”
“The next day, I talk about it in detail to my wife, I tell her about the characters and the way the book interweaves all these different stories”continues the man who recently signed Don’t Look Up: Cosmic Denial for Netflix. “I explain to him that it is a story of enrichment but against a backdrop of the collapse of the banking system, a story of corruption and generalized complacency, funny and upsetting at the same time…”
Produced by Brad Pitt’s company Plan B (which also produced The Strategist, another adaptation by Michael Lewis), The Big Short is a film which proves that you can laugh with a subject which does not a priori lend itself to humor. An original, lively work, which happily handles the absurd and the cynical, and in which four Hollywood megastars compose with jubilation. To discover it, go to Netflix.
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