MOVIE REVIEW; TOO BIG TO FAIL [NYTIMES.COM]
It can’t be easy to create a financial thriller. There’s no blood, there are (usually) no bodies. How do you create excitement when most of the action consists of middle-aged white men in conservative suits talking on the phone, and the closest thing to a car chase is a stately procession of big black Town Cars? How often can you show people peering at spreadsheets and recoiling in alarm? What do you do when the scandal itself might as well be labeled “Too Complicated to Understand”? The HBO film “Too Big to Fail,” based on the book of the same name by the reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times, about the financial crisis of 2008, uses every cinematic trick in the book, but ultimately succeeds because we know that the danger was real.
One way to create an atmosphere of crisis is simply to have your characters assert that it’s a crisis. In “Too Big to Fail,” directed by Curtis Hanson (“L.A. Confidential”), people are always saying things like, “If we don’t do this now, we won’t have an economy on Monday.” There’s also a lot of staring soulfully through windows or into mirrors. The hero of Mr. Sorkin’s version of events, Treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., played by William Hurt, indicates the terrible stress he’s under by talking ever-more softly. The Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke, played by Paul Giamatti, does the same. As things get worse, the conversation at their weekly breakfast meetings degenerates into a low rumble.
James Woods as Dick Fuld, Chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers
This being HBO, there is a lot of potty mouth, which is another easy adrenaline inducer. It’s hardly surprising to hear James Woods screaming obscenities in a movie, but a bit more surprising to hear them pouring from the mouth of the character he plays, Richard S. Fuld Jr., the chief executive of Lehman Brothers. Even Timothy F. Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, looking even more angelic as played by Billy Crudup than he looks in real life, flings around the vulgarities with abandon. That is how big a crisis it was.
Mr. Sorkin’s take on the story is the conventional one. That doesn’t make it wrong. Presidents back to Reagan overderegulated the financial industry. Borrowing became too easy, especially for houses. People got in over their heads. When they couldn’t pay back their debts, they dragged the banks (and one insurance company, A.I.G.) down with them. Finally, too late for Lehman Brothers, the government stepped in to save the banks, and the economy, from collapsing. The movie reminds us that President George W. Bush needed Democratic votes to get the necessary legislation passed, because Republicans were already demagoguing it. And “Too Big to Fail” makes clear that, in Mr. Sorkin’s view, doing nothing would have been catastrophic. The movie is heavy on the idea that saving the troubled banks required merging them with healthy banks, thus creating new institutions that are even bigger than the ones that the government rescued because they were too big (to be allowed) to fail.
William Hurt as Hank Paulson, Secretary of Treasury; Joey Slotnick as Dan Jester, Special Assistant to Hank Paulson
This version of events is largely correct, I think, and the movie tells it with exemplary clarity. I’ve never come closer than the two minutes after watching “Too Big to Fail” to understanding what a “credit default swap” is (except possibly for an hour or so after reading Michael Lewis’s “Big Short”). The exposition can be heavy-handed. When Cynthia Nixon of “Sex and the City,” here playing the Treasury Department’s head of public affairs, asks, “What should I tell the press?,” the movie stops for several minutes so that all the men in the room can explain things to the only woman (and to us).
“Too Big to Fail” uses all the familiar “Law & Order” techniques for creating a sense of urgency on the cheap. People never seem to just sit at their desks while talking on the phone. Instead, they stride purposefully down long corridors, surrounded by a cloud of aides, barking into their BlackBerrys. And as soon as the current plot development has been taken care of, they just snap the phone shut without saying goodbye. Rude! But message conveyed: This is a crisis. There is no time for niceties.
Obnoxious, thumping music in the background can create tension and suspense, no matter how banal what’s going on in the foreground may be. The “Airplane” movies mocked this convention hilariously. In “Too Big to Fail” the hilarity is unintended, but genuine. The music behind a standard helicopter shot of Lower Manhattan leads you to expect another Sept. 11, but all you get is more men in suits, more meetings, more black Town Cars.
Cynthia Nixon as Michele Davis, Assistant Secretary, Public Affairs; Topher Grace as Jim Wilkinson, Chief of Staff, Treasury
Part of the fun of “Too Big to Fail” is trying to recognize the famous people from Hollywood who are impersonating somewhat less famous people from Washington and Wall Street. Besides those already mentioned, there is Ed Asner as Warren E. Buffett; Tony Shalhoub as John J. Mack, chief executive of Morgan Stanley; and Evan Handler (also of “Sex and the City”) as Goldman Sachs’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein.
Bill Pullman is in a lot of movies and rarely seems to get the girl. Here, though, playing the suave Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, he is the closest thing to a romantic lead in a story with virtually no women. He doesn’t get the girl, because there is no girl to get. But even before the movie starts, he gets the securities firm Bear Stearns, with a big government subsidy, and by movie’s end he is being begged to accept more taxpayer money to take over a bank or two.
Speaking, I think, for the HBO-watching public, I would have liked to see a torrid affair between Mr. Dimon and the French finance minister, Christine Lagarde. Played by Laila Robins, she has only a brief cameo, berating Hank Paulson for allowing Lehman to go under. But it’s one of the highlights of the film when she calls him Honk. I suppose that an affair in the movie was out of the question because (as far as we know) it never happened in real life. It will be a happy moment when petty distinctions like this, between fantasies and real life, disappear for good. We’ve pretty much done it in Washington. Why is Hollywood so far behind?
