Of course, to understand how a bunch of Wall Street whizzes-Michael Burry (Christian Bale), Mark Baum (Steve Carell), Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling), and their cohorts-found a way to bet against the American economy, you still have to understand how that economy functions (or doesn’t).
'I figure if I’m getting into it, and I’m the guy who did Step Brothers, what’s going on here?' 'Economics is actually fascinating, it’s the language of power-but somehow we've been conditioned to treat it like it's boring,' McKay says. That’s because director Adam McKay, who adapted his movie from Michael Lewis’s book of same name, realized that the economic meltdown happened because people thought they couldn’t understand something they easily could have grokked. Yet, it works-and even more weirdly, you walk out understanding the fineries of the situation that kicked off the great recession. It's a movie about the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, by the guy who made Anchorman. Nothing about The Big Short should add up.
