Adam McKay’s The Big Short is ingenious, economical, and expert in translating a difficult subject – the mortgage crisis of 2008 – for non-expert viewers.  McKay makes what could be an arcane and tedious topic move, and his use of characters and celebrities to directly address and instruct the audience is particularly effective. The film is also wildly entertaining, and for the most part, well paced. In adapting Michael Lewis’s book, McKay alternates between keeping a sense of humor and paying appropriate deference to the deadly serious nature of the crash, revealing the seeming lunacy of modern finance and inherent flaws in our system. As we cover the prescient characters who foresaw the collapse of the mortgage market, and created a new financial instrument to short it to their advantage, the film builds to a depressing climax that is educational and even moving.

But one has to remember, McKay tacked on tedious moral lessons about our financial system in, of all things, the moronic buddy comedy The Other Guys. So after watching Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg engage in their crazy hijinx, we received a sermon on the ponzi scheme that is Wall Street, though blessedly, only during the credits.  McKay did the same thing for campaign finance reform in the Ferrell/Zach Galifinakis comedy The Campaign, but his jeremiads actually crept into the film, and I’ll bet dollars to donuts he considers Anchorman 2 a modern Network.  Anybody who had to append morality epilogues to these light stinkers clearly was itching for more serious fare.

Unfortunately, when McKay got it, he made a riveting, rip-roaring, true life story, and then . . . he choked. A moral fable was not enough.  McKay wanted a moral scolding.  So, every representative of the establishment – bankers, investors, an SEC investigator, a bond rating company analyst, two Florida real estate brokers, the financial reporter – are to a person grotesque cartoons. As depicted by McKay, they might as well be spit-roasting the homeless. Worse, every single one of our hedge fund manager protagonists, all of whom made a shit ton of money off of the collapse, is presented as a tortured, morally conflicted hero. Profiteer Brad Pitt scolds two characters by reminding them that when unemployment rises 1%, 40,000 people die. They are chastened, though I doubt chastened enough to do much about it. Christian Bale, who made billions for his firm betting on the economy to fail, closes his shop with an email to investors that bemoans the cruelty of the market. And the third genius, Steve Carell, literally apes Christ on the cross as he weighs whether to sell. He is urged to do so by his staff as they call him from the steps of a church! And yes, he too cashes in, but only after much soul searching and many, many lectures. And after all that, McKay adds a coda where he warns us that it is all happening again, no one went to jail for it the last time, and so, we are not absolved.

It was all right there, the deed done with, if not a scalpel, a stiletto.  But McKay couldn’t trust his own narrative and so, he used a butcher knife. The ensuing bludgeoning is gonna’ pay off with an Oscar tomorrow night, followed by, I am sure, a sermon much like the one that kneecapped his own movie.

The first half of this biopic whizzes by, introducing the three main characters (NWA founders Easy E, Ice Cube and Dr. Dre) as young pop visionaries who see the future and impact of gangsta’ rap. They rise against the backdrop of racially-charged LA, and director F. Gary Gray gives each their own space and voice. We invest in them individually and collectively, while rooting for their success as they navigate fame, the music industry, the violence of their environment and financial and professional jealousies. Gray also skillfully juxtaposes the raw anger of their music with the brutality of Compton. It’s good, involving fun.  The second half, however, is slower, and the path is well-worn. Excess takes its toll, “the man” (i.e., manager Jerry Heller, the record company, cops and the government) does what he does, and it sure gets lonely at the top.

Overall, this is an entertaining and competent if overlong film. It’s also filled with factual inaccuracies, to be expected when rich men collaborate on the telling of their own rise (and Dr. Dre and Ice Cube are mega-rich). A few, however, are problematic. Gray obviously wants to set a time of rampant police brutality and oppression, so he has Dre arrested for simply talking back to a thuggish Compton cop. All well and good, except Dre was actually arrested for . . . unpaid parking tickets! Ha ha ha. Not very gangsta’.

Similarly, there is a scene where the Detroit police, led by a Bull Connoresque whitey and his phalanx of all-white cops, chase NWA off the stage and beat them viciously, throwing them one by one into a van for processing, for playing “Fuck the Police.”  In fact, while NWA was arrested in Detroit, it wasn’t at the venue, nor were they beaten. Instead, later that evening, they were safely ensconced in their hotel when they went to the lobby to meet some girls.  There the cops took them in with little fanfare, and no body blows.

Oh well.  They still had attitude.

This is a gripping but measured film, a reportorial procedural and a meditation on the impact of the sexual abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic church in Boston, as reported on by The Boston Globe in 2002. “Spotlight” refers to an investigative team of the paper (Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Brian d’Arcy James) who, under the direction of a new editor (Liev Schreiber) takes on the case. As they dig deeper, the breadth of the scandal widens (the number of culpable priests balloons from 13 to 87) and the institutional protections surrounding the church become more evident and intrusive. The story also takes its toll on the team, all some form of Catholic (cultural, lapsed, etc . . . ) at the time of the investigation.

The film is economical and direct and it stubbornly avoids cliche’ and histrionics. It is also a rare “based on true events” movie that feels authentic throughout, not jumped up or glamorized.  It is very similar to A Civil Action, another Boston based movie that tackles a legal case (water contamination in Woburn) by analyzing the city and its institutions. Like that film, Spotlight packs its biggest punch during scenes of interviews with the survivors of abuse, which are nothing short of heartrending.

If you want a gripping movie about the mechanics of taking on a story like this, this is it, and if you want a companion piece that shows exactly how an individual molester operates, I recommend Doubt. Watching this film, as with Doubt, stirred my own memories on the subject, having been educated by the Catholic church for eight years of grade school and by the Jesuits for four years of high school. I saw the picture with my kids and tried to explain how what is now an indelible black mark on the church wasn’t exactly a deep, dark secret by the time I reached high school, yet somehow, was not a full-fledged scandal. I explained that we had a religion teacher who was very charismatic, but who you just kind of knew not to be around. Why? It’s hard to say. It could have been my own sense of it, or the fact that my brother or his friends imparted some decent advice, or the fact that after gym, when you were showering, he could sometimes inexplicably be seen in the locker room.

Whatever the impetus, you learned not be around Father Bradley, but I guess I just assumed that all boys shared the same sense of something being off and were similarly self-protective. That wasn’t the case, and in 2007, I was one of thousands of recipients of a mass email detailing the misdeeds of this priest at our high school, and at other places where he taught afterwards, encouraging us to report if in fact we had any knowledge of his abuse. Without the work of The Boston Globe on the story, that email may never have come to be.  In that manner, this film is a testament to solid, door-knocking, pavement pounding reporting.

If you’re interested in the priest who plagued my school, the story is here.  The original Boston Globe story can be found here.