BEFORE: In for a penny, in for a pound, I guess. I'd love to get off of U.S. politics and get to something like superheroes, which, umm, makes more sense. Yeah, I know, but that's where I find myself these days. I would rather get away from reality for a while, movies with people doing impossible things, feats of strength, flying, battling demons or aliens, anything. Just way too much MSNBC over the last 17 months...wait, what month is it now? I've been sucked into documentaries about civil rights, voting rights, Trump, the Iran hostage crisis, and now I'm back on financial collapse. I guess it's better than watching the news about the pandemic, sexual harassment, infrastructure bills and, umm, voting rights again. But not by much.
Topher Grace carries over from "Irresistible".
THE PLOT: Chronicles the U.S. financial meltdown of 2008 and centers on Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
AFTER: This is the kind of film, like "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks", that probably should have been presented in the (apparently very unpopular) documentary format. Because if you make a dramatic film about the 2008 U.S. bank bail-out, then where, exactly, does that trend end? Will we have dramatic versions of the Trump/Hillary debates of 2016, or the COVID pandemic of 2020? God damn it, that's probably on the way, you just KNOW somebody's filming that now, and it WON'T be Brad Pitt playing Dr. Fauci, or George Clooney either, it will be somebody B-Level, we'll be lucky if it's Steve Buscemi. I fear the worst.
But oh, wait, somebody already made a documentary about the housing crisis and the ensuing bank bailout, it was called "Capitalism: A Love Story", but unfortunately it was directed by Michael Moore, and he was too busy pretending trying to get interviews by bringing camera crews in through building lobbies rather than picking up the phone and setting up real interviews, the way you're supposed to do it. Then he blamed the housing market speculation and investing into failing mortgages on FDR, because he died in 1945 and didn't pass the second Bill of Rights, or something. Bad credit where bad credit is due, Mr. Moore. America's banks got THEMSELVES into trouble by bundling up a bunch of failing mortgages that they THEMSELVES had pushed onto people who were credit risks. You sell a bunch of houses to people who can't afford them, and then try to get other people to invest money in the failure of those bundles, and what the hell did you THINK was going to happen. Even at street level, we kept hearing in 2004 that "the bubble's going to burst, the bubble's going to burst, any day now". I appreciate the fact that the market held off until after I sold my Brooklyn condo, but that bubble DID burst.
Now it's 2021, and we're asking the same questions - is it morally right to evict somebody from their homes, just because they can't make the payments? So far this year, the prevailing answer has been "No", because COVID, so they keep passing extensions on the moratorium on evictions, but sooner or later, they're going to run out of extensions, and suddenly thousands of families are going to be homeless. What happens then? Do we have to re-define what it means to be lower middle-class, to be working three part-time jobs and not have a home to sleep in at night? Who has time to sleep, anyway, if they're working three part-time jobs? And then if you don't have any stuff and you don't need to sleep, who needs a house, anyway? They're vastly overrated, things are always breaking and the lawn needs to be mowed and there are probably bugs and mice in there, so you're better off just sleeping on the street, Americans. Think of it as camping, but all the time! Camping is fun, right?
So this movie shows us the same story, but from the other side, from the point of view of the people who put it together - Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and his team of former Goldman Sachs employees, who assure us time and time again that there's NO conflict in having former bank workers in charge of regulating the banks. Right. We get to see them having in-depth discussions that SO want to be "West Wing" scripts, only they're not, and having high-level discussions in this office, that office, and, wait for it, on the PHONE! Wow, what excitement? The only thing they didn't do was have two banking executives meet at an abandoned amusement park, between the ferris wheel and the closed-up sideshow. But then I guess that would have been distracting.
Lehman Brothers falls first, allegedly because the top executive couldn't stay out of the meeting with the Korean investors, and just HAD to show up to get them to buy the crappy real-estate portfolio, too. Damn, and we were SO CLOSE to a deal that would save America. Wait, no, it would have saved Lehman Brothers, which isn't really the same thing. Then after Lehman, something happened with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, I guess they divorced or something, which was a shame because they seemed like such a nice couple. (I'm kidding, I sort of know that these are nicknames for federal mortgage loan companies, or something.)
The next company at risk was AIG, which insured millions of government employees and also was trading partners with Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America and oh, what a surprise, GOLDMAN SACHS. But again, it's important to remember here that there was no conflict, just a bunch of former Goldman Sachs employees saving the company that insured and protected Goldman Sachs. Right. But AIG was seen as the domino that was connected to all the other dominoes somehow, so the Feds bailed out AIG for $180 billion, then tried to pair up all the other big banking firms so that each firm's failing assets would be countered by the other firm's successful ones, but for some reason the big banks in America didn't like the government that they all had to get married with each other, they much preferred to keep things casual and screw the American public on the side instead.
For decades we've been waging this war over how much government is appropriate, one side always wants MORE government oversight and involvement, which means more spending, and the other side wants LESS government oversight and involvement so they can break the law and not get caught. Wait, is that right? Screw it, I'm going to stick with that, prove me wrong. Somewhere in the middle, we end up with entities like Fannie Mae, which is the Federal National Mortgage Association, which is both a government-sponsored enterprise and ALSO a publicly-traded company. As both of those things, it's vulnerable to market fluctuations, but also PART of the market, it relies on things going well in government to succeed, but ALSO consumer confidence, and so therefore, much like our money system in general, if people stop believing in it, it's going to start disappearing. Was it ever really there in the first place? The money in your wallet has value only because everyone around you BELIEVES that it does, if you wanted to trade it in for something like gold or silver, you better hope that you're the only one with that idea, because there just ain't enough gold to go around. It turns out we've had crypto-currency for years, because nobody really understands how pieces of paper with numbers and Presidents on them have inherent value, because they don't.
So that's the 2008 bailout, in a nutshell, the government had to give the banks a bunch of money to make up for their terrible decisions over the preceding few years, and then, get this, CONVINCE the banks to take the money. They didn't want to at first, because how would that look, like they needed it? Turns out, they needed it, but then they had to agree to SPEND that money, that was the catch, by lending it out to other people. Because if word got out that the banks couldn't afford to give everybody their money back at the same time, by God, then we'd really all be up the creek. So as we saw in the classic movie "It's a Wonderful Life", you can go to the bank any time and get your money out, as long as not too many people get the big idea to do that on the same day. But then, come on, what are you going to DO with that money, hide it under the bed? You've got to leave it in the bank, or invest it somewhere, and just like everybody else, hope that the stock market doesn't crash right after you do that. That's the patriotic thing to do, you chump. And then when that happens, and you lose it all, you've done your part for America. I hope you like camping.
I will admit that I fell asleep last night with about 15 minutes left in this film, but then when I woke up at 9:30 am, I found where I left off and finished it, because I've got to get off this type of topic and move the hell on. I'm in WAY over my head because I don't understand all this high-level banking stuff (or do I?), I'm just a guy who wants to finish paying off my mortgage (in 2034) and then I'll figure things out from there, if I'm still alive. I've got some money saved in accounts that came from previous jobs, but I have no idea how much or what to do about it. Should I be investing MORE in those accounts, or just let them be? Should I cash them in or roll them over into something else? I have no idea - my father will talk about his pension and IRAs for hours if you let him, and I just don't want to be like that. And so I invest a little money every week in comic books, and I doubt that's a very solid method of investing - but anything more complicated than that and my brain starts to get all confused about it.
Also starring William Hurt (last seen in "The Host"), Edward Asner (last seen in "Hard Rain"), Billy Crudup (last seen in "Where'd You Go, Bernadette"), Paul Giamatti (last seen in "Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond"), Matthew Modine (last seen in "Filmworker"), Cynthia Nixon (last seen in "Girl Most Likely"), Michael O'Keefe (last seen in "Instant Family"), Bill Pullman (last seen in "The Killer Inside Me"), Tony Shalhoub (last seen in "How Do You Know"), James Woods (last seen in "The Virgin Suicides"), Ayad Akhtar, Kathy Baker (last seen in "The Jane Austen Book Club"), Amy Carlson, Evan Handler, John Heard (last seen in "The Chumscrubber"), Dan Hedaya (last seen in "Shaft" (2000)), Peter Hermann (last seen in "Philomena"), Chance Kelly (last seen in "Freedomland"), Tom Mason (last seen in "Crimes of the Heart"), Ajay Mehta (last seen in "Lakeview Terrace"), Tom Tammi, Laila Robins (last seen in "Eye in the Sky"), Victor Slezak (last seen in "The Report"), Joey Slotnick (last seen in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"), Casey Biggs, Steve Tom, Bud Jones, Jonathan Freeman (last seen in "Life, Animated"), Linda Glick, Patricia Randell, Erin Dilly (last seen in "Julie & Julia"), Beau Baxter, Chil Kong, James Saito (last seen in "Always Be My Maybe"), Robert Hogan, Laurence Lau, Gregory Jones, George Taylor, Rob Evans, Rutanya Alda, Jennifer Van Dyck, Jill Dalton, Robert Vincent Smith, with cameos from Maria Bartiromo (last seen in "Arbitrage"), Erin Burnett, David Faber
and archive footage of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, John McCain, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, Jon Stewart (all carrying over from "Irresistible"), Bob Bennett, Jim Bunning, Dick Durbin (last seen in "Capitalism: A Love Story"), Alan Greenspan (ditto), Chuck Schumer (last seen in "Fahrenheit 11/9").
RATING: 4 out of 10 golden parachutes
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