Why Adam McKay is America's most powerful political filmmaker
More than a year ago, I talked to movie director Adam McKay, who was receiving an award from the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Because of the occasion, I asked him how he might take on a figure like Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, who represents some of the same cultural phenomena run amok that McKay has skewered in films such as “Talladega Nights.” McKay told me it might be impossible — that LaPierre represented a darkness that not even he could exaggerate.
But at the time, McKay was working on a different sort of straightforward movie about a piece of U.S. history so absurd that it defied parody. And now that we have the results of McKay's adaptation of “The Big Short,” Michael Lewis's chronicle of the housing bubble and the resulting Great Recession, it's fascinating to see how McKay's career has been leading to this sort of outraged storytelling all along.
I've found myself coming back again and again to McKay's comedies not just because they're very funny but also because of their sly political intelligence. His muse is Will Ferrell, who under McKay's direction has played San Diego newsreader outraged at having to share his desk with a talented woman in “Anchorman”; a NASCAR driver corrupted by fame and money in “Talledega Nights”; a petulant man-child in “Step Brothers”; a cop with a dark side investigating financial wrongdoing in “The Other Guys”; and even a deadbeat behind on the rent he owes to a cranky toddler in the viral video “The Landlord.”
Liberal political rhetoric often scorns the sort of embattled white men McKay and Ferrell explore with such love and humor. It's this kind of contempt that leads liberals to mock conservatives for voting against what liberals perceive to be their self-interest, or to vilify them for trying to hold on to privileges that are rapidly losing their value. This kind of self-satisfaction is precisely what McKay rejects.
“The Big Short” shares many preoccupations and villains with McKay's comedies, among them financial wrongdoing and people who have marinated in superiority so long, they're begging to be slapped on a grill. But if McKay's comedies are about persuading audiences to care about individuals who find themselves at a loss in crazed environments and moments of social upheaval, the great genius of “The Big Short” is to recognize that those individuals are sitting in theater seats, rather than playing out the drama on-screen.
Lots of political movies want to speak to audiences, but “The Big Short” does so explicitly and constantly; the fourth wall might as well not exist in the movie. Sometimes that means a character pauses to let you know you're watching a prettied-up piece of movie magic. At other moments, investor Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) is narrating bits of financial history, like the invention of securities made up of large bundles of mortgages.
But most powerfully, “The Big Short” enlists the audience in the characters' outrage. In these moments, McKay makes viewers' ignorance of and confusion about the causes of the Great Recession not a source of shame, but a badge of moral purity. “I'm guessing most of you still don't really know what happened,” Jared tells viewers at the beginning of the movie. “Yeah, you got a sound bite you repeat so you don't sound dumb, but come on.”
The result is complicity rather than condescension, especially when Jared asks us “It's pretty confusing, right? Does it make you feel bored? Or stupid? Well, it's supposed to. Wall Street loves to use confusing terms to make you think only they can do what they do. Or even better, for you to just leave them the (expletive) alone.”
And McKay's puckish method of empowering his audience is to have Jared announce breaks in the film so that Margot Robbie can explain how mortgages are bundled into bonds from the comfort of a bubble bath; chef Anthony Bourdain can compare the repackaging of subprime mortgages to the way he reuses fish that isn't selling in fish stews; or so Selena Gomez can hang out with a behavioral economics expert in a casino and we can all walk away understanding synthetic collateralized debt obligations.
There's another important way in which McKay has reversed the political polarity that animates his comedies. In McKay's fictional movies, the message is always that individual men can change, shucking off the larger forces that have deformed their characters and rediscovering their real and decent selves. But while the subject of “The Big Short” is a small group of men who spotted rot in the system early enough to profit from an inevitable crash, McKay spikes their profits with poison and pessimism about the prospect of systemic change.
And at the end of “The Big Short,” Jared's vinegar-y narration slaps down the audience's expectations that the outrages the film described must have led to substantive, lasting reform. The idea of reform itself is just another lie governments and businesses use to appease us, McKay suggests. And while that may feel like a more pessimistic message than the themes of personal redemption that animate McKay's comedies, the two aren't incompatible.
We shouldn't mistake saving ourselves for saving our institutions or our country. And sometimes what seems like moral vision is really just another way to become compromised. “I never said I was the hero of this story,” Jared cautions us.
When I spoke to McKay last year, he was working on “The Big Short,” and his political impatience was evident. “It's time to panic. Climate change, the level of violence, the level of income inequality?” he told me at the time. “It's time to full-on lose our cool.”
If “The Big Short” doesn't become a rallying cry, McKay can go back to making sharp comedies that resonate both with people who recognize their politics and with audiences who are with him only for the jokes. But if it does resonate as more than a sharply told, intelligently acted movie, McKay might finally be recognized for the political thinking and communicating he's been doing in his films all along.