I’ll be honest; I never had much use for McKay’s early films. This is not so much due to his writing as the fact that for the lion’s share of them, his muse was Will Ferrell, a comedian whose work I have never really enjoyed Ferrell’s entire overblown approach to comedy; I realize it appeals to many, but even when he was on Saturday Night Live, I always found it extreme. I found there were enjoyable moments in Anchorman and Talladega Nights, even a few in The Other Guys, but McKay’s and Ferrell’s over-the-top approach to comedy basically leaves me cold. That may have been the main reason I was initially very favorable the two very different dramedies, one of which followed to a degree, the same approach Sorkin would be successful with.
Like Moneyball, The Big Short in 2015 took what most would probably consider an unfilmable subject – explaining how the housing crisis leads to the great recession of 2008 - and makes it into a fascinating story. When I saw it, I was initially very impressed with everything about the film – the way McKay told a very complicated story involving financial moves that are way above anybody who didn’t get a degree in economics in a way that most viewers could understand, the way he managed to make it surprisingly funny, and some truly masterful performances from Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, and especially Steve Carell. But in retrospect, I don’t think the film holds up particularly well. It does more or less what Sorkin does in his films, but his approach doesn’t particularly seem to work that well. I mentioned that Sorkin’s films never talk down to their audience. The Big Short doesn’t do that so much as it talks at its audience. Many of the characters break the fourth wall every five minutes, and frankly it becomes irritating after a while. The film is close to a comedy for a very harsh subject, and I think that’s why I liked it at the time – it seemed to be the only way to tell this kind of story. Then a couple of years later I saw a movie from 2011 called Margin Call, and my opinion changed dramatically.
Written and directed by J.C. Chandor, Margin Call is fictional but is far more powerful. The film takes place over a twenty-four hour period in 2008 at a Wall Street firm that has just survived another round of layoffs. Then a very low-level executive sees something and tells his boss. Basically, he sees what’s about to happen. The movie follows the executives as it goes up the food chain to the very top. Then there’s a late night meeting. The owner tells everybody the market is going to crash. Then he asks them to find a way to save the firm through it. The method they come up with is horrific, and it’s gone along with almost no argument. Everyone at the firm has one concern – saving their jobs. Not one person can be considered nice. The fact that the economy is going to crater and possibly destroy the country barely enters into their thinking at all.
In retrospect, I’m not surprised The Big Short did (relatively) well at the box office and almost nobody saw Margin Call. I think the latter is the superior film, because it tells us in a way The Big Short barely hints at; that the ‘Masters of the Universe’ almost destroyed the world economic and were more interested in what it might mean for their resumes. The film features some truly exceptional performances from a great cast – Kevin Spacey (before the fall) Simon Baker, Zachary Quinto, Demi Moore and Stanley Tucci. Jeremy Irons is extraordinary as the head of the firm. He gives a monologue when the horror show is finally beginning in which he defends everything that has happened and what he intends to keep doing in a monologue that is horrifying in the other banality of how he justifies people like himself. Spacey’s characters response, after being put through the ringer vocationally and emotionally is heartbreaking: “I’ll stay on… but not because of that speech. I need the money.” This film doesn’t try to entertain or inform; it just lays out the facts and the behavior in a way that McKay has to overexplain to everybody.
Say what you will, at least The Big Short tries to entertain its audience. The same can not be said for McKay’s follow-up film Vice, a biopic of Dick Cheney.
I don’t know if a ‘traditional’ film about the life of Cheney, arguably the most controversial figure in all of recent politics, could have been made, but I have to see, even that would be far superior to McKay’s approach, which is basically to do the same thing he did in The Big Short. The first problem is it’s unnecessary. American’s probably don’t understand how the housing markets work, but I’m fairly sure they have a decent understand of how our political system works. Instead, McKay not only has a narrator who tells us everything he believes we need to know (and that has problems which I’ll get to itself) that narrator basically spends half the movie lecturing at us. Considering a biopic is at least supposed to be a character study, that’s a flaw in filmmaking.
The second major flaw is he keeps cutting away from the action of the film to show clips ‘explaining’ things to us. Frankly, I think we could live without them. But he does so instead of trying to let his cast – which is frankly one of the best he’s gotten - perform. You get the feeling that most of them are puppets to this frankly unqualified writer-director. Christian Bale is remarkable as Cheney (though we must give full credit to the makeup department here) and Amy Adams gives an incredible performance as Lynne Cheney, but the rest of the cast – particularly Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush and Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld, are basically wasted. The rest basically become caricatures. And that’s before you consider all the tricks that he puts in.
Then there’s the fact that the unnamed narrator (Jesse Plemmons) is ‘revealed’ to be the man who ends up donating his heart to Cheney a few years earlier. This is pat and cheap and seems like an utter waste. All of this would be bad enough if the movie came even close to trying to pulling back the veil behind our most secretive Vice President. It doesn’t even try to do that. I’m reminded of a description of Oliver Stone’s Nixon – ‘it’s a $50 million term paper.” I think that phrase is more accurate to Vice, except even term papers have to follow some rules in telling a story. This film doesn’t even pretend to do that.
In all candor, I think McKay and the movie world as a whole would be better served if he went back to making obnoxious comedies. His political views are so obvious in his last two films that it’s really difficult to even consider them entertainment. The same can clearly not be said for most of Sorkin’s movies. (It should be noted, however, that between Moneyball and Steve Jobs, Sorkin spent the lion’s share of his time writing The Newsroom, in which any attempt at political neutrality or subtlety is thrown out the window in the Pilot and goes downhill from there. I have a feeling McKay would be more in agreement with Sorkin’s politics there.) I don’t know whether or not I agree with McKay’s initial statement about their politics, but when it comes to their making serious subjects entertaining to the masses, Sorkin wins by a landslide. And I’m looking forward more to his next project than McKay’s.
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