Why I Love Michael Lewis Books (and Movies)

I don’t know why, but I’ve been binge-watching Michael Lewis movies lately. By “Michael Lewis” movies, of course, I mean movies based on his books, of which I have seen two: “Moneyball” and “The Big Short.” (Two movies are not much to binge on but I manage by rewatching them over and over.) Besides the Michael Lewis connection, these films share several other qualities: both are excellent docudramas, both feature Brad Pitt, and both are funny as hell.

They’re funny because they so effectively skewer the hypocrisy, greed, and rank stupidity of people in various positions of power. These include Wall Street elites (The Big Short), sports authorities (Moneyball), and other purveyors of (daft) conventional wisdom. In both films, relative nobodies arrive at a great intellectual insight, an epiphany that reveals some deep, dangerous truth about the world around them. In The Big Short, it’s the insight that the U.S. housing market is a pyramid scheme. In Moneyball, it’s the realization that major-league baseball is mis-valuing its players, leading to general abuse and malfeasance.

“The Big Short”: A Tragedy in Five Acts

When Adam McKay’s The Big Short came out in 2015, it was a modest hit, earning a respectable 133 million dollars worldwide (70 million domestically). But for a non-fiction biopic with a large cast, a complicated story-line, and a nerdy subject, the fact that it did even this well seems amazing.

True, the movie had some “A-list” leading men (Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, and Christian Bale), but they functioned as character actors, lost in the ensemble nature of the work, which was itself a complex mélange of styles and concepts. The dialogue riddled with abstruse financial terms like Collateralized Debt Obligation, Credit Default Swap, and International Swaps and Derivatives Association license. So, again, its success seems almost miraculous.

But then again, every great movie, in retrospect, seems like a kind of miracle—a fabulously unlikely combination of talent, inspiration, and sweat. The Big Short is, undoubtedly, a Great Movie. I own a copy of the film and have watched it many times, and each viewing reveals some detail I missed previously. The film is so dense and complicated that I felt the need to write about it.