The real life players behind The Big Short - and one notable absence (2024)

Bale! Carell! Gosling! Pitt! boasts the poster for The Big Short. The financial crisis film — part drama, part farce, but almost all true — has brought out the Hollywood big guns to persuade viewers who would normally switch off at the mere mention of derivatives, leverage and synthetic CDOs to invest 130 minutes of their time. It could scarcely be more topical: the FTSE 100 is back in bear market territory, with £52 billion wiped off the value of Britain’s largest companies yesterday.

If you find your mind wandering you can always snigg*r at the seriously sub-prime hair they’re sporting: Christian “Batman” Bale’s Lego-like mop, Ryan “hey girl” Gosling’s jet-black perm and Brad “sexiest man alive” Pitt emulating the hirsute bloke from The Joy of Sex.

Based on the bestseller by bond-seller-turned-journalist Michael Lewis, The Big Short — in cinemas tomorrow — has just been nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture. It explains a crisis that’s still remarkably little understood, using the tools of Jenga, blackjack and celebrity cameos. A minor miracle occurs on screen: it manages to make all of this gripping. Sexy, almost.

The film tells the story of the men who realised that the US housing market was a ticking timebomb, propped up by junk loans. They’re the men who bet that the banks would lose billions and then won big as the economy went into meltdown.

Men such as Mark Baum (Steve Carell), Dr Michael Burry (Bale) and Ben Rickert (Pitt) — who either exist or are based on real people. I’ve repeatedly written “men” deliberately. For The Big Short paints the financial world as the ultimate testosterone zone, a giant “ladies keep out” sign hanging over Wall Street.

In the film the female characters fall in to three main camps: wives, regulators and strippers. So yes, there’s a woman working in compliance. And Oscar-winner Melissa Leo plays the fool at a credit rating agency who proclaims: “I’m sure the world’s banks have more incentives than greed.” Karen Gillan pops up as a drunken Securities and Exchange Commission worker who tries to flirt her way to an interview at an investment bank. And Marisa Tomei — another Oscar-winner — gets perhaps a minute of screentime as Cynthia Baum, the wife of Carell’s character.

And then we see a lot of women: if by that you mean female flesh wriggling around poles. At one point, Baum’s team go on a mission to test how bad sub-prime loans are. They end up in a strip club because the dancers have taken out these mortgages. He explains to one half-naked woman that she won’t be able to refinance. “On all my loans?” she asks. She owns five houses and a condo. Point made.

Inevitably, The Big Short flunks the Bechdel Test, which requires a film to feature two women talking about a subject other than men. Yes, an extraordinarily low bar.

Now, I can guess what you may be thinking. Wall Street is a boys’ club. Isn’t Adam McKay — who both directed the film and co-wrote the screen-play — simply showing the financial crisis as it happened, with men both the main orchestrators, and the main beneficiaries? Isn’t he making the case that the crisis was partially caused by masculinity run amok?

In the post-mortem of the crash, a common line — the IMF’s Christine Lagarde and the Labour Party’s Harriet Harman both said it — was that if it had been Lehman Sisters rather than Lehman Brothers, the crisis might not have happened. And besides, goes the thinking, you can’t simply insert a woman into a work of non-fiction in the name of equality.

Except that doesn’t apply here. In Lewis’s book one of the first characters he mentions is a very high-profile woman who’s mysteriously disappeared from the film. In what seems a meeting of Hollywood and Wall Street sexism, an already male-dominated world has been further masculinised. Anyone who has read the book could watch the film and wonder, “Where’s Whitney?”

That’s Meredith Whitney, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co who moved the markets. Her grim prognosis for Citigroup — the world’s biggest bank which she said was short on capital — wiped eight per cent off its value in a single day. A few days later, its chief executive Chuck Prince resigned.

If Burry (Bale) — a man who gets “his hair cut at Supercuts and doesn’t wear shoes” — is the Cassandra of the story, a sage who speaks the truth but isn’t believed, Whitney is its Oracle: she called it right, and people hit sell. As Lewis puts it: “Whitney became [the famed stockbroker] EF Hutton: when she spoke, people listened. Her message was clear: if you want to know what these Wall Street firms are really worth, take a cold, hard look at these crappy assets they’re holding with borrowed money, and imagine what they’d fetch in a fire sale.”

So why has she been axed? It’s Hillary Clinton Photoshopped out of the situation room all over again. I contacted a representative for McKay to ask why but no answer came.

My most generous reading of why she might have been cut is to stream-line the story. Being an analyst is less sexy than being the trader who bets everybody’s house against the housing market and brings in the moolah. But the whole point of this film is that it has “sexed up” an otherwise dry subject. And Whitney is anything but dry: they’ve axed the most naturally appealing character.

Nicknamed “the Blonde Bombshell”, she was a regular on Fox News. In 2013 she said, “complaining bankers remind me of melodramatic soccer players” about bankers’ tendency to dive when facing a minor challenge. You could imagine Naomi Watts, Maria Bello, Jennifer Aniston, and perhaps even Julia Roberts fighting for that role — a rare meaty part for an actress over 40.

Things haven’t gone so well for Whitney with her crystal ball-gazing since The Big Short. She claimed municipal bonds were the next bubble to burst but they never defaulted on the scale she expected. She set up an advisory firm that closed. Then she set up a hedge fund — and that shut last year. But surely she’d want her best moment immortalised on the big screen?

At an advanced screening of the film, Michael Lewis explained that some things had been changed from the book to the film. The character Steve Carell plays, Mark Baum, a decent man who’s angry at the world and perpetually on the verge of boiling over, is actually based on the hedge fund manager Steve Eisman, but was re-named on his request. The tragedy that befalls Baum — his brother’s suicide — isn’t what happened to Eisman (his baby son died but he didn’t want that in the film). So even if Whitney hadn’t wanted to appear there could have been another glamorous, blonde doom-sayer.

Adding to the whiff of sexism there are two cameos breaking the fourth wall that enter pervy uncle territory. The first has Margot Robbie in a bath explaining intricate parts of the crisis; the second, Selena Gomez in a low-cut dress at a blackjack table.

These are jokes, of course. The premise is that the audience won’t listen to an explanation of complex financial instruments unless there’s a hot blonde that you can fantasise about — her modesty protected only by bubbles. But that essentially says the film is pitched at those attracted to women — ie mostly men. There was no yin to that yang, no Idris Elba in the shower explaining credit default swaps. So is the implication that only men are interested in the financial crisis?

It’s pretty alienating to half the potential audience the film should be trying to attract. And what’s so terrible about that is that the biggest victims of financial crises are usually women. At the most extreme end — as the UN has outlined — a global downturn means girls in the poorest countries are taken out of school, get worse food or no medicine.

It seems to be a theme in films at the moment that even when women are featured they somehow get sidelined. There was Rey not appearing in Star Wars merchandise despite being the film’s protagonist. Of the two women in The Revenant one is raped, the other murdered (Mama Bear is probably the female who gets the most screentime). And The Hateful Eight line-up seems to betray a prevalent attitude: “Oh, we need diversity! Let’s cast a woman, a black guy and then six ‘normals’.”

What’s especially frustrating about The Big Short is that they have cut a ready-made fascinating woman who actresses would have lined up to play. The Big Short is The Boys’ Short, and it’s the poorer for that.