This Versus That: The Big Short versus Margin Call

Welcome to the incredible, much-loved, multi-award-winning series This versus That! Okay, it’s actually just something I’m starting out right now, so bear with me.

In film, it’s fairly common for them to be based on true stories; quasi-biographical films that are stranger than fiction and explore some period, event, or character in history. And for yours truly, these can be hit and miss, as they often overlook key moments, misrepresent history or just flat-out betray the true story (I’m not saying which film does this terribly but Braveheart knows who it is). Or, as is the case with the latest slew of corporate biopics, they’re a cynical cash grab; an attempt to rehabilitate or promote a brand. I mean, Air, seriously? It’s a two-hour Nike ad about a marketing team; hardly an underdog story.

But I digress. After all, we let people like what they like here.

Now and then, however, films will cover the same topic with wildly different approaches. And that’s what this series is really about.

And the inaugural kick-off to this dorky little series of mine? It’s everyone’s favourite dinner table conversation: the 2008 economic recession.

For the four of you who didn’t immediately click away once you read that opening, let’s talk about the films that spawned from one of the most egregious cases of trickle-down economics gone awry. This topic is no stranger to films being made about them, from dramas like Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps to neo-westerns like David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water to noir-crime films like Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly to so many documentaries like Inside Job. The list is endless, and I’m sure more are coming.

But the two particular films in this sub-genre I want to discuss are Adam McKay’s The Big Short (2015) and J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call (2011).

The reason is that these two films have such clear visions and approaches that are wildly different from one another, yet they’re telling essentially the same story, albeit from different perspectives. To me, The Big Short is My Cousin Vinny to Margin Call’s 12 Angry Men. And I enjoy them both immensely.

But let’s start with 2015’s The Big Short, directed by Adam McKay. It’s a fiery, unrelenting, and impassioned rant about moral failure and places the blame for the recession squarely at the feet of the greedy financial players, dubious institutes, and the impotent government establishment that encouraged, empowered, and enabled this catastrophe to balloon into a bubble that caught everyone when it exploded. It’s high-energy, fast-paced, and absurdist, and it makes for a fantastic watch. It’s also funny, abrasive, and gratifying in all the right ways. It feels like it’s venting all of our collective systemic anger, and in essence, doing a comedy roast of the entire finance world. This is also why, at times, it can feel lecturous and maybe even a little condescending, as it preaches to the choir and yells in our faces about why we should be upset. The film is held together by brilliant editing and hilarious fourth-wall-breaking, mockumentary-style filmmaking. The film is also incredibly kinetic, with handheld shots, music-video style slow-motion and comedic timing, and features celebrities explaining dry financial concepts, which serve to help our understand by introducing the mechanics of the finance world so we can better appreciate the banality of evil.

The film also has rare interstitials with quotes. A particular favourite of mine being: “Truth is like poetry, and most people fucking hate poetry.” A hilarious but poignant and prophetic reflection on how we interpret these events.

The Big Short is relentlessly paced like an endless pursuit action film, and it only slows down just long enough to highlight a moment of brutality, before it starts up again. It’s angry and exhausting: the ultimate cinematic angry sex, and we love it. It intentionally makes the finance people of the film come across as either moustache-twirling Bond villains that pull weird faces while they eat expensive sushi or comically stupid goons that unload automatic weapons into a cardboard cutout of Osama bin Laden and chest bump one another. These are our antagonists: Elmer Fudd if he discovered day trading.

And therein lies some of what I think is missing from The Big Short. It feels less subversive and exploratory, and more noisy and angry. It sometimes attempts to highlight the human element of the crisis but it never really digs deeper into it. It explains complex financial instruments to assure us that it knows what it's talking about, but it sometimes feels like this is just there to paint over having not a lot to say. But, if I’m being honest, I’d understand finance a lot more if Margot Robbie in a bubble bath and Anthony Bourdain using culinary metaphors were my teachers.

At the end of the day, however, The Big Short is a truly exceptional film. I don’t want my criticisms to sound like I didn’t like the film because it’s actually the complete opposite. I remember watching this film with its bombastic style and feeling a sense of catharsis. I felt the exact same frustration with the financial crisis, and for the longest time, it felt like the more I learned about it, from in school to talking with friends to just reading the news, the more I would shake my fist at the sky and curse the gods, and the more it felt like the void was swallowing everything up and flashing back a crooked smile. Then, this film comes out and the entire world collectively yells a resounding “Yes!” Not because we weren’t all on the same page, but because someone with a blockbuster budget and Hollywood A-listers said with their full chest, “This is wrong and they’re wrong for doing it.” Hell, they even won the Oscar for it, which is like being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for giving Elon Musk a wedgie.

But for all of its strengths, The Big Short does feel more like a satisfying thrill ride rather than a dramatic exploration of the humanity that underpinned the crisis. The film itself claims at first that it was stupidity that fueled the crisis, and later says it wasn’t stupidity but a callous indifference.

And that’s it. That’s the motive.

And hey, I don’t doubt that it’s a ‘both-and’ situation. Stupidity met indifference in a bar in 1977 and had a cocaine-fueled one-night stand and several decades later gave birth to the 2008 recession. But to reduce it to those two things is to reduce the crisis itself to nothing more than a whoopsy-daisy, and abstract it in such a way that it feels like another world and not our problem. And that’s why as gratifying as it is for someone to roast greedy criminals and ineffectual leaders, the more human and institution-centred story of Margin Call felt like a more quiet, subversive, and grounded exploration of the financial crisis.

This time, Margin Call, directed by J.C. Chandor, plants the blame for the crisis squarely at the feet of its own chief suspects: Us.

In Margin Call, we spend a night with a group of financial analysts and traders after they discover that a financial hurricane is inbound and they can either baton down the hatches or be washed away. It comes across more like a Greek tragedy than some larger-than-life blockbuster. It also feels multi-generational; the junior analysts we’re following form the young and impressionable up-and-comers trying to make a buck, the seasoned traders and finance gurus who are living the high life and making that buck, and the ones who have made it to the top of this pyramid and use a helicopter to pick up their groceries and wipe their mouths with hundred-dollar bills. It’s this vicious corporate ladder and toxic manifestation of ambition in character form, wherein they all aspire to be the guy at the top, and the guy at the top looks down from on high and says, “Yeah, this is pretty great, actually”. The film takes place primarily in a high-rise finance building on Wall Street, as we and the characters look down on the world beyond the glossy floor-to-ceiling from their very own Mount Olympus deciding the fates of their worshippers, who are basically ants. It’s a social strata that shows just how these financial wizards see the world and the hierarchy by which they maintain power.

There is an incredible scene in which Zachary Quinto and Penn Badgley’s characters ask Paul Bettany about how much he made the past year, as they stand sucking on cigarettes on the roof of their high-rise Manhattan office building. Bettany gives the awe-struck Quinto and Badgley a concise breakdown of how he spends his multi-million dollar pay. We can’t help but wonder ourselves what we would do with this much money, how we would spend it, and how different and better our lives would be with that kind of money. And that’s exactly the film’s point. Then, to drive the point home, as they look down over the city late at night lit up in lights, Bettany stands over the railing, and as he teeters on the edge, he shares a piece of wisdom with us:

People on the edge aren’t afraid of falling, they’re afraid that they’ll jump.

This is the central question it poses to the audience. We aren’t just disgusted by those who caused this crisis, we’re scared that we might’ve done the same for the money. The film is riddled with human moments like this; a strange kind of honesty and cynicism about who we are, what we are, and what we want when there’s no one around to hear us.

Quinto, in an earlier scene, says as much, when he’s breaking down the crisis. He tells us that he holds a doctorate in aerospace engineering — a literal rocket scientist! — but the money in finance is considerably better. In a clear voice, Quinto speaks to the theme of the film: the allure of money is too intoxicating. And later in the film, when Bettany and Badgley are returning from their journey on the streets of New York to speak with Stanley Tucci, the fired executive who has important information and was cast out of their high tower, Bettany waxes poetic about the way of the world. The sort of moral gymnastics that says that they aren’t villains or evil, they’re just pragmatic. People, the ones that’ll vilify them, want all the same things — money, cars, big houses, and expensive toys — and they’ll love them while it’s on offer and crucify them when their dreams come crashing down.

The film drives its ultimate point home in the final act with Jeremy Irons, the billionaire company head, and Kevin Spacey, a senior trader. Spacey expresses his disgust over their actions and desire to quit; ironic in 2024. But Jeremy Irons, who has just steered the company ship away from certain death by pushing their problem onto others, enjoys his expensive victory meal from atop his throne and explains the 21st Century circle of life to Spacey. He tells us that this has happened before, and it will happen again. It’s the nature of things, the nature of us.

Margin Call tells us that history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes. And The Big Short tells us, we fucking hate poetry.

Ultimately, The Big Short feels like a bloody and entertaining slasher movie. It’s a story about a terrifying supernatural force that exists outside of ourselves, terrorizing us before being destroyed because we called it by its true name and said we don’t believe in it anymore. And then we got a cliffhanger ending where we learn we didn’t quite vanquish it and it will return in the sequel, Recession 2: Electric Boogaloo. Only those sequels were called Vice and Don’t Look Up, and we saw first-hand the power of diminishing returns. Margin Call, on the other hand, is a dark and nuanced Greek tragedy about a disease called capitalism, which infects and corrupts us, taking our need for happiness and mutilating it into an insatiable appetite. It grows into a pandemic, and we ourselves are the vector by which this disease spreads—we are its tendrils. There is no scripture to yell that’ll exorcise the demon, no silver bullet that’ll take down the werewolf, no stake to ram through the heart of the vampire. It takes an inoculation, a diet change, and regular exercise. And let’s be honest, that sounds too much like hard work so we’ll yell about it instead.

Or maybe Margin Call is a horror story, after all. But it’s the best-worst kind. The A24 kind. One where the call came from inside the house and we were the monster all along. It was our own dream that created the horror that chased us in the dark, and we need to reflect on how our own ambition turns to apathy, our own desire turns to greed, and our own compassion turns to selfishness. This is what I really loved about Margin Call, and what makes me enjoy it a little more as a dramatic exploration than The Big Short.

At the end of the day, we are all capable of awful things when it benefits us, and we all have the power to moralize it.

Now this piece hardly scratches the surface of these two films, and I could go on. But it’s already long enough as is and you’ve got better things to do with your time!

So, what are your thoughts on these films? What are some other films that cover the same true story that you think are worth discussing?