Cast: Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt.
Spoilers for Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short and real life follow.
During the promotional cycle for The Big Short Michael Lewis was interviewed in Slate and said
“... there is no way you can take a book and make it into a great movie if you are totally respectful of the book. You have to break it and redo it. I would be bad at taking something I care about and think is great—I wouldn’t publish it if I didn’t think it was great—and bust it up. I would be wedded to my own stuff. And my presence would be a heavy hand on the process.”
It’s heartening that Lewis voices this sentiment; the creator of source material should have a hands-off approach and adapters should be more concerned with making great art than being faithful to the original. That is why it’s disappointing that the writers and directors who Lewis has granted creative freedom to have made uninspired mediocrities.
Moneyball, the first movie inspired by a Lewis book, is a crowd-pleasing and critically well-received sports movie that told the story of Billy Beane’s (Brad Pitt) early aughts Oakland A’s, who managed to be one of the best teams in baseball despite having one of the smallest payrolls. As a lifelong baseball fan, I bristled at some factual inaccuracies throughout the film(1), but just as I wouldn’t care if Star Wars: The Force Awakens violated the canon laid out in official novelizations, movie audiences should not care that Miller and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s narrative doesn’t hold up to journalistic scrutiny. My major problem with the movie was that its climax violated the theme of the book (and itself) to cater to genre conventions. Like all sports movies Moneyball builds to The Big Game, however Oakland’s Big Game is a regular season game against Kansas City where they extend their winning streak to 20 games, one game shy of The 1935 Cubs’ record, which they’d fail to match. Billy Beane spends 2 hours preaching process over results and the film's rousing conclusion is winning a meaningless game before falling short of a relatively meaningless goal. My ideal Moneyball movie would not end with Billy Beane triumphantly looking at the A’s third order win total, but it would not attempt to replace the real life anti-climax with a contrived climax. One thing that makes watching live sports so compelling is that anything can happen; in the film adaptation of Moneyball only things that happen in sports movies can happen.
The Blind Side tells two parallel stories: an interesting piece of sports analysis about the evolution of the left tackle position, and a heartwarming but uncritical human interest story about the Touhy family adopting a poor African-American high schooler cum Ole Miss and NFL LT Michael Oher. The book has trouble balancing what could be viewed as a heartwarming story about the Touhy family’s generosity or could be viewed as unsavory story about Ole Miss football boosters adopting an elite football prospect as part of a successful recruiting bid. I was told that John Lee Hancock’s film doubles down on the heartstring tugging elements of the story, with no examination about the underhanded aspects of NCAA football recruiting, while painting Oher as a 6’4” 300 lb Eliza Doolittle who needs the help of a sassy white lady to reach his full potential , so I declined to see it.
The Big Short, like many of Lewis’s business books are about iconoclasts who zigged when everyone else zagged. It follows different groups of traders who bet against the housing market when the financial sector believed a housing collapse was impossible. Lewis’s oeuvre has become synonymous with respectable oscar-fare (The Big Short is his third movie nominated for Best Picture). Posters touted his name recognition, “From the Author of MONEYBALL and THE BLIND SIDE” was prominently displayed, albeit in smaller font than BALE, GOSLING, PITT, CARRELL.
Though The Big Short is based on a true story all of the principal’s names, except Michael Burry (Bale) have been changed because they are composites of several people or have been whitewashed. These characters have components of several people from from Lewis’s book, but also have large chunks of director Adam McKay. Jared Vennett (Gosling) and Charlie Geller (John Magaro) are millennials whose references: playing blackjack with Harry Dean Stanton, Robert Redford in All the President’s Men and Dune’s Baron Harkonnen are the references of a 47 year old Hollywood director. It’s not just the pop-culture references: the politics, morality and the outrage of The Big Short are McKay’s, not his characters.
The fraud that led to the housing market crash of 2008 was about rich, powerful people obfuscating the truth and McKay’s anger is righteous, but his attempt to mine that anger is a patronizing screed that is obfuscating in its own ways. A stylistic flourish that has gotten a lot of attention are the fourth-wall breaking explainers where Margot Robbie, Selena Gomez and Anthony Bourdain explain financial jargon to the audience. Ignoring the accuracy of the explainers, (the Gomez one could be called The Big False Analogy) these scenes are a microcosm of the movie. McKay doesn’t believe an audience could possibly understand one of the biggest news stories of this millennium so he enlists the only people who could help the general public make heads or tails out of the crash, celebrities. The fourth wall breaking does have some benefits, Gosling’s brio is fun and the narration that preempts the cottage industry of awards season fact checking is consistently clever, but other Vennett monologues such as an alternate history followed by a a Borat level NOT is comically inert because the misdirection would only fool someone who hasn’t read/heard/seen the news in the past 10 years.
Like Moneyball, The Big Short simplifies the technical wonkery at the heart of the story to make the narrative more palatable to a wide audience, but in the process it flattens many of the peripheral characters and glorifies the protagonists. But unlike Moneyball, McKay’s film is incompetently directed and clumsily written.The film toggles between sitcom-mockumentary level handheld camera work and straight-to-Netflix documentary style montages. A sequence in Vegas that mimics Scorsese’s frenetic visual language is as energizing as snorting baking soda, elliptical references to Mark Baum’s tragic past are as hamfisted as any Christopher Nolan’s backstory and clunky visual metaphors like an employee at a rating agency wearing comically oversized tinted glasses abound.
A criticism of Lewis’s The Big Short was that it didn’t delve deep enough into the morality of brokers makings billions by destabilizing the economy. McKay’s attempts to rectify this mistake by having conflicted heroes, but their angst doesn’t create ambiguity, it adds to their heroism. It’s not enough that they correctly predicted the future, made billions and look like Brad Pitt, they also get to look sad while delivering speeches detailing their compassion for the poor people who were swindled. Michael Lewis smartly removed the his heavy hand from the adaptation of The Big Short, next time he should also remove Adam McKay’s.
It’s heartening that Lewis voices this sentiment; the creator of source material should have a hands-off approach and adapters should be more concerned with making great art than being faithful to the original. That is why it’s disappointing that the writers and directors who Lewis has granted creative freedom to have made uninspired mediocrities.
Moneyball, the first movie inspired by a Lewis book, is a crowd-pleasing and critically well-received sports movie that told the story of Billy Beane’s (Brad Pitt) early aughts Oakland A’s, who managed to be one of the best teams in baseball despite having one of the smallest payrolls. As a lifelong baseball fan, I bristled at some factual inaccuracies throughout the film(1), but just as I wouldn’t care if Star Wars: The Force Awakens violated the canon laid out in official novelizations, movie audiences should not care that Miller and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s narrative doesn’t hold up to journalistic scrutiny. My major problem with the movie was that its climax violated the theme of the book (and itself) to cater to genre conventions. Like all sports movies Moneyball builds to The Big Game, however Oakland’s Big Game is a regular season game against Kansas City where they extend their winning streak to 20 games, one game shy of The 1935 Cubs’ record, which they’d fail to match. Billy Beane spends 2 hours preaching process over results and the film's rousing conclusion is winning a meaningless game before falling short of a relatively meaningless goal. My ideal Moneyball movie would not end with Billy Beane triumphantly looking at the A’s third order win total, but it would not attempt to replace the real life anti-climax with a contrived climax. One thing that makes watching live sports so compelling is that anything can happen; in the film adaptation of Moneyball only things that happen in sports movies can happen.
The Blind Side tells two parallel stories: an interesting piece of sports analysis about the evolution of the left tackle position, and a heartwarming but uncritical human interest story about the Touhy family adopting a poor African-American high schooler cum Ole Miss and NFL LT Michael Oher. The book has trouble balancing what could be viewed as a heartwarming story about the Touhy family’s generosity or could be viewed as unsavory story about Ole Miss football boosters adopting an elite football prospect as part of a successful recruiting bid. I was told that John Lee Hancock’s film doubles down on the heartstring tugging elements of the story, with no examination about the underhanded aspects of NCAA football recruiting, while painting Oher as a 6’4” 300 lb Eliza Doolittle who needs the help of a sassy white lady to reach his full potential , so I declined to see it.
Though The Big Short is based on a true story all of the principal’s names, except Michael Burry (Bale) have been changed because they are composites of several people or have been whitewashed. These characters have components of several people from from Lewis’s book, but also have large chunks of director Adam McKay. Jared Vennett (Gosling) and Charlie Geller (John Magaro) are millennials whose references: playing blackjack with Harry Dean Stanton, Robert Redford in All the President’s Men and Dune’s Baron Harkonnen are the references of a 47 year old Hollywood director. It’s not just the pop-culture references: the politics, morality and the outrage of The Big Short are McKay’s, not his characters.
The fraud that led to the housing market crash of 2008 was about rich, powerful people obfuscating the truth and McKay’s anger is righteous, but his attempt to mine that anger is a patronizing screed that is obfuscating in its own ways. A stylistic flourish that has gotten a lot of attention are the fourth-wall breaking explainers where Margot Robbie, Selena Gomez and Anthony Bourdain explain financial jargon to the audience. Ignoring the accuracy of the explainers, (the Gomez one could be called The Big False Analogy) these scenes are a microcosm of the movie. McKay doesn’t believe an audience could possibly understand one of the biggest news stories of this millennium so he enlists the only people who could help the general public make heads or tails out of the crash, celebrities. The fourth wall breaking does have some benefits, Gosling’s brio is fun and the narration that preempts the cottage industry of awards season fact checking is consistently clever, but other Vennett monologues such as an alternate history followed by a a Borat level NOT is comically inert because the misdirection would only fool someone who hasn’t read/heard/seen the news in the past 10 years.
Like Moneyball, The Big Short simplifies the technical wonkery at the heart of the story to make the narrative more palatable to a wide audience, but in the process it flattens many of the peripheral characters and glorifies the protagonists. But unlike Moneyball, McKay’s film is incompetently directed and clumsily written.The film toggles between sitcom-mockumentary level handheld camera work and straight-to-Netflix documentary style montages. A sequence in Vegas that mimics Scorsese’s frenetic visual language is as energizing as snorting baking soda, elliptical references to Mark Baum’s tragic past are as hamfisted as any Christopher Nolan’s backstory and clunky visual metaphors like an employee at a rating agency wearing comically oversized tinted glasses abound.
A criticism of Lewis’s The Big Short was that it didn’t delve deep enough into the morality of brokers makings billions by destabilizing the economy. McKay’s attempts to rectify this mistake by having conflicted heroes, but their angst doesn’t create ambiguity, it adds to their heroism. It’s not enough that they correctly predicted the future, made billions and look like Brad Pitt, they also get to look sad while delivering speeches detailing their compassion for the poor people who were swindled. Michael Lewis smartly removed the his heavy hand from the adaptation of The Big Short, next time he should also remove Adam McKay’s.
(1)(Had Moneyball been released today, I’d be tempted to publish a 10 Things Moneyball got wrong listicle: 1. Jeremy Giambi was on the 2001 A’s, he was the guy Jorge Posada tagged out at home plate in the film's opening montage.)
