In my campaign review for The Big Short I wrote:
The focus is certainly on the cast – how could it not be with names like Gosling, Pitt and others involved – but not at the expense of the story. The campaign never really stops selling the movie as having a point and a message of some sort, not just as a piece of entertaining fluff with a bunch of good-looking and popular movie stars. So it’s a fine line that’s being walked and I think it does so successfully.
In many ways that summation was right. The movie itself is absolutely entertaining and the cast, direction and screenwriting are all whip-smart and manage to bring the point of view as well as all the facts (and figures) behind the story into clear focus for the audience. It’s funny, it’s charming and it keeps moving at a pace that seems electric. On that front the campaign sells the movie very well.
But I was taken aback, after rewatching the trailers, how much the marketing missold the movie. It’s to the point where I don’t know how there wasn’t more blowback from the audience over it. There are a few scenes in the trailers that aren’t in the movie and more that are cut in a way as to misrepresent how the scenes in question play out in the actual film. I’m looking specifically here at the “Show me the difference between stupid and illegal…” scene, which in the trailer makes it look like Bale and Pitt’s characters are in the room with Carell and Gosling’s when they’re very much not.
Even more than that though, the second trailer in particular really doesn’t sell the story of the film accurately. It presents a film where a group of outsiders and oddballs are going to take on the greed and fraud that’s infected financial institutions and is about to destroy the American – and world – economy out of some sense of righteous indignation. It’s like they’re on a quest to right some wrongs. The movie, though, is about how this group of outsiders and oddballs does see the disaster coming but decide the best thing to do is profit off of what’s coming. Everyone in the movie, while seething with anger over the wrongs being committed by big banks, figures out the best solution is to make lots of money for themselves. They’re not looking out for the tens of millions of people who are about to get hurt; They’re betting on that actually happening and taking the nearest million dollar life raft.
Let me be clear that The Big Short is a really good movie. It’s not a home run but it’s a stand-up triple that brought in two runs. The campaign, though, sells it as a crusade against the bad guy banks, but that’s not it at all. It shows you how the world economy crumbled years ago not through the eyes of the people not railing against injustice but through the eyes of people who are going to make sure that when the ship sinks they’ve secured the good china from the stateroom. They’re not bad actors, but they’re certainly not heroes, which is how the movie was sold.
