TELEVISION REVIEW
Economic Crisis Unfurls in Hushed Suspense
By MICHAEL KINSLEY
Published: May 22, 2011 / http://tv.nytimes.com/2011/05/23/arts/television/too-big-to-fail-on-hbo-review.html?_r=0
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.
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.
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.
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?
TOO BIG TO FAIL
HBO, Monday night at 9, Eastern and Pacific time; 8, Central
time.
Presented by HBO Films. Produced by Spring Creek Productions
and Deuce Three Productions. Directed by Curtis Hanson ; written by Peter
Gould, based on the book “Too Big to Fail” by Andrew Ross Sorkin; Mr. Hanson,
Paula Weinstein and Jeffrey Levine, executive producers; Carol Fenelon,
co-executive producer; Ezra Swerdlow, producer; Mr. Gould and Mr. Sorkin,
co-producers; Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, consultants.
WITH: William Hurt (Henry M. Paulson Jr.), Ed Asner (Warren
E. Buffett), Billy Crudup (Timothy F. Geithner), Paul Giamatti (Ben S.
Bernanke), Topher Grace (Jim Wilkinson), Matthew Modine (John Thain), Cynthia
Nixon (Michele Davis), Michael O’Keefe (Chris Flowers), Bill Pullman (Jamie
Dimon), Tony Shalhoub (John J. Mack), Evan Handler (Lloyd C. Blankfein), Laila
Robins (Christine Lagarde) and James Woods (Richard S. Fuld Jr.).
Michael Kinsley is a senior editorial adviser for Bloomberg
View, a new opinion section of BloombergNews.
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