What The TV Taught Me: HBO’s Too Big To Fail

I’m going to come clean: I did not and do not fully understand the financial crisis. I think many Americans were and are in the same boat; in some ways it’s because the issue is so complicated that the system started to crumble. Sub-prime mortgages, bundling of toxic assets, I’ve got the vocab, but I don’t really know I’m talking about. But I wish I did. So when I moved back into my parents’ house for the summer holiday and settled into a post-Finals spell of television-zombiehood, HBO’s Too Big Too Fail caught my eye.

First off, what a cast! That guy from That ’70s Show, and the red-head from Sex in the City, Paul Giamatti, who I mostly remember from Sideways but shows up all over the place, that guy from Monk. And the commercials are so dramatic, I get chills, they remind me of the Deadliest Catch previews.  But above all, it quickly became clear that this movie, like the the 624-page book  by Andrew Ross Sorkin it is based on, was going to capture the tale of financial crisis as a story, and a dramatic one at that. Only, instead of finding time to read a 624-page book, Too Big Too Fail is a movie that lasts less than two hours and can viewed while eating ice cream, which is much more in line with my summer style.

Here’s the thing: Not only do I now have a basic understanding of the financial crisis, but I really enjoyed the movie. The director, Curtis Hanson, also directed one of my favorite movies-adapted-from-books, The Wonder Boys (book by Micheal Chabon). The film is well-shot, pretty to look at and dynamic to watch. The acting was consistently impressive, and the few sections where characters were obviously explaining things merely for the viewers benefit were clear and concise without being condescending. Actor William Hurt’s portrayal of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson feels genuine and studied, Edward Asner’s  Warren Buffet is a delight and James Wood as Lehman Brother’s CEO Richard Flud is downright masterful.

Though the story focuses mostly on Paulson’s perspective of the crisis, the Richard Flud subplot feels almost like a Shakespearean fall from grace. The back-story is that Flud spent much of his long career clamoring to the top at Lehman. He was hugely invested in the company both financially and emotionally; to see is crumble beneath him was understandably a painful experience. He seems to be denial about the problematic toxic assets that are keeping potential investors away from the flailing company and we see him grow increasingly more stoic and stubborn, then desperate as the severity of the situation become clear. In this role, James Wood reminds me a little of Ian McKellan’s Richard in the 1995 Richard III, sans all that Early Modern infanticide and creepy political weddings.

Still, the Richard comparison brings up a good point when considering this movie. I won’t go so far as to say that the CEOs we see gathered in this film are modern day American kings, but there is certainly something interesting about thinking of these people as characters with dynamic emotions and actions — people to be pitied, really — when many Americans would be quick to blame them for the current financial crisis. While the investment bankers and business leaders we see in the film were arguably just doing their jobs, the fact of the matter is that they were all gambling with other people’s money, and that anyone with an understanding of how these toxic assets or sub-prime mortgages worked had to be ignoring a problem and sending it on to someone else, making money off it in the meantime. This mess exists because of greed, of course not only because of the investment bank’s greed, but the average-Joe American’s greed too. People committed to loans and bought houses they could never afford, assuming that if the bank thought they could do it they could. Unlike in a Greek tragedy, there is no curse of the gods to blamed, nor is there a neat deus ex machina to wrap everything up. Of course, this perspective is the generalization of someone with a pretty limited understanding of the national economy, but it seems like everyone was assuming someone else would be the responsible one, and that why everything fell apart.

The film Too Big to Fail offers a pretty clear explanation of the financial crisis, but to tell the story in dramatic way, the tale had to be condensed and I sense maybe a little dramatized. I’m fine with a little poetic license in art, particularly in film adaptations. Wall Street blogger Guy Kulman insists the book is better — more thorough, maybe a little less biased, and focused more or journalist truth-uncovering than making good television. I’m also a huge fan of the This American Life podcast’s explanation in episode #335 The Giant Pool of Money. The podcast first aired in May of 2008 and was a joint project with NPR’s Planet Money, a podcast that explains national and global financial matters in an accessible and interesting way. Still, if you learn best from narrative forms or are just seeking a dramatic film with current event relevance, Too Big To Fail might be your best bet. If you get HBO or are comfortable in the shady back alleys of the Internet, I certainly think that this film is worth your time.

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