New movie review: The Big Short

Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling star in director Adam McKay's housing crisis comedy-drama The Big Short.

“We’re going to see a dead kid. Maybe it shouldn’t be a party.” – Gordie Lachance in Stand By Me

Screw the people who did this to us. You may recall the housing market crash of seven or eight years ago that essentially flattened the planet. We have a pretty good idea of every individual at the top of every corporation responsible and all their underlings who helped. They are easy to find because instead of ending up in prison, where they rightly belong, they are mostly still running other companies. Those who are not are living secluded dream lives on their millions and millions of dollars. So, yeah, screw ’em.

Co-writer-director Adam McKay’s The Big Short is a snotty, acid-tongued rebuke of all the people and systems that got us into this mess. The film is often a little too smart ass for its own good – perhaps to be expected from the director of Will Ferrell comedies such as Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and Step Brothers – but it is punk-rock, activist filmmaking of the highest order, a grimy, angry takedown of all the liars and bastards who tanked the world economy.

Finn Wittrock and John Magaro in The Big Short.

Written by McKay and Charles Randolph, based in part on the book by Michael Lewis, the script has the notable distinction of having no heroes. There are people you could choose to root for – Michael Burry (Christian Bale), Mark Baum (Steve Carell), Charlie Gellar (John Magaro), or Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock) – but let’s not kid ourselves. Regardless of how much concern they show, every main character in this movie is trying to get rich off the destruction of the housing market. It is simply a question of how much guilt will be associated with all that cash.

For a guy like Baum, the answer is a lot of guilt. Baum hates the high-finance world and would dismantle the whole thing if he could, while he also harbors guilt over the suicide of his brother. Gellar and Shipley are two young guys with a small company who see a way to make some money and get in way over their heads. The deeper they go, the darker things get, and the harder the load is to bear on their souls. Burry is an analyst who saw the crash coming from a mile away and just wants his investors to acknowledge he is right so he can make them a lot of money.

Most of these guys are just stumbling their way through the world of Wall Street, trying to make money and come out the other side with their consciences clean – diametrically opposed positions, the film seems to argue. Such is not the case for Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling). He is a shyster who just happens to be right. He tells Baum and his group they can make a killing betting against the traditionally solid housing market, which is what Burry has already told his investors.

The engine that drives the film is the investigation as Baum and his team and Gellar and Shipley set out to determine just how precarious the market is. They put boots on the ground and head to Florida to meet the people hawking and taking these bad loans. They dig into the scary, tragic reality of bankers doing everything they can to undermine the system and prey on the most vulnerable groups of people. As the evidence mounts, it becomes increasingly clear this whole house of cards is set to tumble.

However, it takes a trip to a bankers’ convention in Las Vegas to convince Baum just how beyond repair the situation is. If the film has a soul – it could be argued that it does not – it is Baum, and Carell is magnificent at portraying a man who thinks of himself as fed up, but deep down, he maintains some kind of optimism. This scandal, this fraud, and these crooks are what finally rob him of his hope. By the end of the convention, he is ready to double down on the impending crash. After all, no reasonable person could meet the people at the helm of this ship and foresee any conclusion beyond shipwreck.

Gosling in The Big Short.

McKay and Randolph’s only major misstep is in the character of Vennett, who narrates most of the action. He is smarm incarnate, completely convinced of his own intelligence and shallowly unburdened by guilt or conscience. By giving the film over to this jerk – who it should be said is played to utter perfection by Gosling – the tone of the piece feels off, and the emotional beats the filmmakers work toward do not land the way they otherwise might.

It is commendable that McKay has made an enjoyable film out of a fairly dry topic. You will likely hear of the repeated gimmick of using popular or attractive celebrities to explain complex banking and investment terminology. Margot Robbie in a bubble bath is a particular highlight, as is Selena Gomez at the blackjack table. It is all well and good, and it sure is a lot of fun, but something about the approach just does not sit right with me.

The reality is people lost their homes, their pensions, and their lives. The entire world only now is starting to claw its way back out of the abyss. This was wanton destruction perpetrated by lowlife scum who got away with it because they did not use guns or knives but power and influence. They are the worst kind of criminal. By serving up its information with a side of humor, The Big Short hopefully will help a lot more people understand what really happened to the economy almost a decade ago, but I have trouble laughing along with any of it. The only thing I feel is anger.

See it? Yes.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Actor

Eddie Redmayne is the frontrunner for Best Actor for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.

Each day as we make our way to the Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 22, Last Cinema Standing will take an in-depth look at each of the categories, sorting out the highs, the lows, and everything in between. Check back right here for analysis, predictions, and gripes as we inch toward the Dolby Theater and that world-famous red carpet.

Best Actor

The nominees are:

Bradley Cooper for American Sniper

Michael Keaton for Birdman

Steve Carell for Foxcatcher

Benedict Cumberbatch for The Imitation Game

Eddie Redmayne for The Theory of Everything

Best Actor is easily the most stacked category every year, with a ton of worthy contenders and too few spots to put them in. This year, for instance, you could put together a list of great performances that would make a tremendous list of nominees without including a single one of the actual nominees. As a thought experiment, here is my alternative list: Jake Gyllenhaal for Nightcrawler; Timothy Spall for Mr. Turner; Brendan Gleeson for Calvary; David Oyelowo for Selma; and Phillip Seymour Hoffman for A Most Wanted Man.

I could go on like this all day with Oscar Isaac in A Most Violent Year, John Lithgow in Love Is Strange, Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice, Ellar Coltrane in Boyhood, Aleksey Serebryakov in Leviathan, and on and on and on. The point is that while the five nominated performances are each fantastic in their own right, the Best Actor category at the Oscars is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the best performances of the year. It is not just this year either, as similarly long lists could be made for any year. If you want to talk about Best Actress, it could fall the same way, though the contender field there is often unfairly narrow, and that is a good discussion to have another day.

What we have, then, are the five performances Academy members liked best, and all credit to them, they liked some damn good performances. Maybe most remarkable is that four of the five nominees, including the two frontrunners, are first-time nominees. None of these actors has won an Academy Award before. In fact, this is the only acting category this year not to feature a previous winner. The last time not one of the nominees was a previous winner was in 2006, so no matter who wins, it will be a history-making night for someone.

Michael Keaton for Birdman – No one in the Best Actor category this year had the same task as Keaton. While the other four nominees were all playing real people – meaning they had books, interviews, videos, etc., to base their performances on – Keaton created a whole new person from just the words on the page. Great words though they may be, they mean nothing without Keaton’s incomparable contribution. He is the heart and soul of Birdman, the burning fire at the center of the film. His performance lends poignancy, gravitas, and humanity to an otherwise caustically satirical endeavor.

Keaton is Riggan Thompson, not because of who he is in life but because of who he is as an actor. Keaton is not great as Thompson because he once played Batman and Thompson once played a Batman-like superhero called Birdman. A lot of actors have played superheroes at one time or another, and more now than ever before, but no other actor could have brought the deep wells of pain and anguish that Keaton brings to the part. This is not a case of stunt casting. It is an instance of casting the perfect actor in the role of a lifetime.

Keaton embraces all of the flaws and contradictions of a man who just wants to be seen as an artist but who has a history of selling out that goal. Every time he walks on stage, he takes with him the hurt of a failed marriage, a washed up career, and a lack of respect. Birdman does not tell the story of a man overcoming all these grievances but of a man who finally channels these grievances into the art he so desperately wishes to make. The words of the writers create this world, but it is Keaton who makes them fly off the page.

Eddie Redmayne for The Theory of Everything – In a relatively brief career, Redmayne has been involved in a number of highly prestigious projects, including Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables, My Week with Marilyn, and The Good Shepherd, but perhaps none has carried more inherent prestige than this biopic of Stephen Hawking. For The Theory of Everything, Redmayne takes on the unenviable task of portraying a famous and beloved figure who is still very much alive and very much in the public consciousness.

Redmayne handles the project by going above and beyond the call of duty and does not so much play Hawking as become him. He has the look, the walk, and the attitude of a man whose body keeps him trapped but whose mind takes him places the rest of us could not even dream about. Characters with disabilities have always been seen somewhat derisively as Oscar bait, but Redmayne does not attempt to milk Hawking’s motor neuron disease for pathos. Instead, he treats it as a fact of life to be dealt with and overcome so that he may attend to more important matters.

In the film’s best scene – and one of the best scenes of the year – Hawking becomes frustrated that he cannot keep up with the pace of a dinner with friends and excuses himself from the table. He attempts to climb the stairs but collapses. He cannot go up or down. Then, he sees his son standing at the top of the stairs behind a safety gate, but the son does not seem as locked in as Hawking in this moment. He tries to reach out to his child, but he cannot connect with him. Redmayne is able to show us this haunting and tragic moment with his body, but he makes us understand it with the longing and despair on his face.

Bradley Cooper for American Sniper – Cooper is the only previous Oscar nominee in this group, and he has been nominated in three consecutive years – for Best Actor in 2012 for Silver Linings Playbook, for Best Supporting Actor last year for American Hustle, and this year. It has been a kind of remarkable career transformation for Cooper, whom many of us first took notice of in The Hangover, though if you are a David Wain fan, you were enjoying Cooper’s comedy chops as far back as Wet Hot American Summer in 2001.

American Sniper was a passion project of Cooper’s, something he has wanted to bring to the screen for years. He chased it through numerous directors and production delays until he and director Clint Eastwood were finally able to bring the story of Chris Kyle to the screen. Cooper’s passion behind the scenes is clearly matched by his dedication on screen, as he transforms himself into a U.S. Navy SEAL.

Cooper has charisma to burn, but here, he channels that energy into a man who has a deep love for his country and an abiding need to defend it but for whom the horror of war gradually begins to take its toll. Cooper looks appropriately warrior-like in his action scenes, but when you watch him at home, that is where the real work appears. Cooper absolutely embodies a man who leaves a piece of his soul on the battlefield every time he goes out and who must fight to keep what he has left when there is no more war to fight.

Benedict Cumberbatch for The Imitation Game – Cumberbatch’s Best Actor case is an interesting one. On one level, he is fantastic in the film as mathematics genius and British war hero Alan Turing, but on another, taken out of the context of The Imitation Game, the performance feels like another in a string of recent performances by actors using the same set of tricks to portray a character who is clearly on the autism spectrum. Cumberbatch, himself, does a riff on the autistic genius who does not get along so well with people on his television show Sherlock. It is a trope that has become commonplace in modern storytelling, so how to judge Cumberbatch’s work here?

Objectively, it is an undeniably solid performance. Given a character who has difficulty showing emotion and who lives so much inside his own head, Cumberbatch communicates a world of feeling and soul simply with his body language and facial expressions. Really, Cumberbatch is marvelous as Turing. The problem is that Turing is not a well written character in the film. Because the character shows little depth, writer Graham Motion does not imbue him with any. Whatever depth we sense in Turing is thanks to Cumberbatch’s excellent portrayal.

Steve Carell for Foxcatcher – Let’s try not to make this about a comedic actor impressing everyone by going dramatic. In the first place, it has been done before with great success, and more than that, Carell already has a demonstrated facility with dramatic acting, even in ostensible comedies such as Little Miss Sunshine and Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. So, it would be great if we could all stop acting so surprised Carell was able to pull off such a magnificent portrayal of a mentally disturbed millionaire in Foxcatcher. He is a great actor, and that is what actors do.

John du Pont, as played by Carell, is a man devoid of either heart or soul. His ghostly pallor suggests a body drained of blood. What he subsists on is power, and he wields it like the only weapon he has. He is an impossibly careful man who speaks with a slow, deliberate cadence and does not so much walk as shuffle. Appearances are everything for him, and the worst fate that could befall him is to be perceived as weak or incompetent. Carell embraces the character as only a gifted actor could and pulls the nearly impossible trick of making a wealthy psychopath understandable, if not sympathetic.

The final analysis

It will be Keaton and Redmayne down to the wire, and Redmayne has a slight advantage, having won the Screen Actors Guild award and the British Academy of Film and Television award. Each won a Golden Globe – Keaton in comedy and Redmayne in drama. Early in the season, some thought Redmayne and Cumberbatch might split the British genius vote, paving the way for a Keaton win, but Cumberbatch’s campaign never materialized. Now, some are theorizing that Keaton and Redmayne may split the vote and clear a path for Cooper to win.

I never have really subscribed to the idea that a split vote could lead to a surprise winner. For that to be true, the third candidate would have to have as much support as the two leaders without losing any votes to them. The math just does not seem to work. I would love to see Keaton onstage accepting an Oscar. It would be one of the highlights of my night. However, all signs point to Redmayne winning for his transformative portrayal of Hawking, and it is hard to argue with that.

Will win: Eddie Redmayne for The Theory of Everything

Should win: Michael Keaton for Birdman

Wish he had been here: Jake Gyllenhaal for Nightcrawler

New movie review: Foxcatcher

Channing Tatum and Steve Carell are men standing in the shadows in Foxcatcher.

Among the hardest things any of us will ever accomplish is to step out of the shadows. We all start in the shadows, be they cast by our families, our histories, or our heroes, yet there is an innate human need to run to the light. Most of us cannot help but desire to eclipse the darkness and bask in the warming glow of the fire, but the closer we get to the source, the bigger the shadows become. The only way to succeed is to step back and create our own light.

Bennett Miller’s strange and stirring new true-crime drama Foxcatcher is about two men who go to great lengths to escape the shadows and be their own light, but in so doing, they succeed only in spreading darkness. Based on the story of millionaire heir John du Pont and the Olympic wrestler brothers Mark and Dave Schultz, Foxcatcher is a master class in using atmosphere to achieve powerful storytelling ends.

Set mostly in Pennsylvania over the course of about a decade, the sun never seems to shine on Foxcatcher Farm, the extravagant estate owned by the du Pont family. An icy chill hangs over the grounds. It is a world frozen in time, a place where money and power trump all, appearances are everything, and might makes right. Onto this tundra walks Olympic gold medalist Mark Schultz. A stranger in a strange land, he has only one person on whom to rely – John du Pont – which is precisely the trap that was set.

The basic facts of the real story are adhered to rigorously. As a result, if you are aware of the history, you will know what is coming. If not, you are in for a series of disturbing surprises. However, by hewing so closely to the true-life material, Miller provides a platform for the kind of deep character study rarely attempted in thrillers. The elements are of melodrama, yet the effect is anything but.

In his first three films – Capote, Moneyball, and now Foxcatcher – Miller has displayed a knack for taking events from America’s recent past and turning them into fodder for exploring the motivations of great men doing morally ambiguous work. He is not so much interested in what happened as why it happened and the decaying culture that allows such things to occur.

John du Pont has turned the outmoded fortress of Foxcatcher Farm into a private fantasy land, where with his infinite wealth, he can craft the narrative that suits him best. He wants to be respected, admired, and loved, not for his family’s name or money but for his own accomplishments. The irony is that in his quest, he wears the name as a shield and wields his checkbook as a sword. Nothing can penetrate his delusions.

The du Pont family wealth comes from weaponry and chemicals. It is tied up in the U.S. national defense and the idea of American exceptionalism. Standing on this platform, John du Pont takes it upon himself to lead the U.S. to Olympic wrestling glory – never mind that Mark and Dave Schultz each won gold medals long before they even knew the du Pont name. His plan is to found a team, fund a training center, and take credit for the glory of leading America to the gold.

When first we meet Mark Schultz, he is delivering a motivational speech to a crowd of disinterested and confused elementary school children. Then, we learn it was supposed to be his older brother, Dave Schultz, giving the speech. Though both won gold medals at the 1984 games, it is clear from the outset that teacher, family man, and all-around good guy Dave Schultz is the admired one. Mark Schultz is the little brother, the afterthought, and the perfect pawn.

Mark Schultz is invited to be the cornerstone of Team Foxcatcher, and though he invites his reluctant brother along, part of him is flattered and excited by the idea of striking out on his own. It seems no one has ever trusted him with this kind of responsibility before, and he is determined to do what he must to succeed on his own terms.

Much of the first two-thirds of the film is a stunning, elaborate, and eerie pas de deux between Steve Carell, as John du Pont, and Channing Tatum, as Mark Schultz. Both actors tear down our preconceived notions of them as performers and inhabit these roles with the kind of abandon most audiences could never have imagined.

Carell, who has gone dramatic as sad-sacks and misanthropes before, sheds any lingering remnants of his nice-guy persona and portrays John du Pont as a mad, manipulative monster whose own need to project a heroic image outweighs the needs of anyone in his orbit. Much will be written about the makeup Carell wears, but the performance is more than a prosthetic nose and capped teeth. He is the physical embodiment of a man who walks with the confidence money buys but with the insecurity inadequacy breeds. Inside, he is twisted, isolated, and corrupted by power. He is a madman.

In contrast, Tatum is given less to do but nails every small detail and explosive outburst of the role. He is not quite a simpleton, but he is a hulking man-child who has been beaten down on the wrestling mat and in life. He is all-too eager for somebody to show confidence in him but too blind to see his brother has been in his corner – literally and figuratively – all along. Tatum has few memorable lines but speaks volumes with his massive frame, hunching his shoulders, crossing his arms, and sliding his feet to convey the full measure of the man he is.

Mark Schultz does not need a father figure, but John du Pont is determined to be one, even if he has to put the words in his would-be protégé’s mouth. He exerts his dominance so early and so often that the younger man has no choice but to bend to his will. John du Pont can only escape his shadows by casting a shadow, and so the conflict begins.

Caught in the middle is the older brother Dave Schultz, played with understated insistence by the always reliable Mark Ruffalo. He is a man torn among loyalties to his brother, to his country, and to his wife and children. Dave Schultz is a benevolent, centering presence who wants to do right by all of his obligations but is engulfed by the darkness around him. For him, there is no good move because when you are on a pedestal, stepping in any direction means falling to the earth below.

Foxcatcher is bathed in darkness and shadows. It takes as its subjects a nefarious man and a blind boy who struggle to escape the pits in which they find themselves. But, its final and most haunting assertion is its message about people like Dave Schultz. Sometimes the hardest place to stand is in the light.

See it? Yes.