On Topic: When fish turn bad

With the 'The Big Short,” the movie's director and screenwriters seem to be saying, OK, let's try looking at the huge, complex disaster of global experience that was the housing market crash another way. Maybe as a comedy.

Because if the heaps of books and newspaper and magazine stories that have attempted to explain what burst the housing bubble almost a decade ago - and why what happened before, during and after remains massively important - then maybe this movie will do the trick.

'The Big Short,” which in a perfect world still is showing in movie theaters in the Corridor, takes true-to-life events, throws in a bunch of recognizable faces (Batman Christian Bale, Steve Carell from 'The Office,” Ryan Gosling, Karen Gillan from 'Doctor Who” and even Brad Pitt) playing fictionalized versions of real-life people, and gets them to act out what more or less transpired.

I say 'more or less” because on occasion the characters will turn directly to the audience to note that what we just saw in fact didn't occur that way. A pair of eager young financiers were tipped off about the pending crisis within the U.S. housing market from a friend rather than finding a prospectus in a big bank's lobby as enacted in the movie, for example.

Gosling, who seems to be truly enjoying himself, at one point stops the action to explain that his character really wouldn't be in at such a trendy bar where we now see him with these 'losers.”

And if some of the banking jargon might get too arcane, there's a bit in which Margot Robbie - last seen in 'The Wolf of Wall Street,” another real-life, greed-infused drama - explains credit default swaps to us … while she's naked - yes, that's right - in a bubble bath and sipping Champagne. It's hysterically funny and, frankly, the details are pretty well covered. (Robbie herself mostly is covered by bubbles.)

Later, chef Anthony Bourdain turns up in a steamy kitchen mercilessly chopping three-day-old halibut to illustrate how bundling together risky mortgages into something called collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), then selling them to other investors, is a lot like making seafood stew with bad fish. Put it on the menu and customers will buy it.

(Very roughly, just for background, here's part of what caused the housing crash, as portrayed in this movie and as I understood it from interviews with a number of CEOs, business owners, brokers and economists for stories at the time and afterward. Feel free to skip this part if you like, and rejoin my column a half-dozen paragraphs below this.

(Lots of banks sold lots mortgages to lots of aspiring homeowners who couldn't afford them. How many is 'lots”? The percentage of these risky mortgages - aka, subprime mortgages - nationwide rocketed upward from 8 percent in 2004 to 20 percent in 2006, according to a Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University 2008 report.

(Those precarious mortgages were packaged with other, somewhat-less-risky mortgages. Eventually a phenomenal amount of dicey mortgages were gathered together and sold on to more investors. Many big banks had a great of money tied up in these investments.

(Then Judgment Day came: In 2007's second quarter the rates on those mortgages went up, and homeowners couldn't afford the higher costs.

(The whole mess was all more complicated than that, but you know what happened next: Crash! Homeowners lost their houses, banks teetered and investors watched vast amounts of their money wash down the drain.

(And I know many of you will disagree, believing this reasoning is too simple - which I admit it is - and there's a good deal more blame to go around. You know how to find me.)

Michael Lewis, author of the book 'The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” and a one-time Salomon Brothers bond salesman, has written other non-fiction books that took on complicated numbers and/or financial issues - 'Moneyball” about baseball played by the rules of market values, 'Flash Boys” and 'Liar's Poker” about Wall Street high jinks, 'Boomerang” about global economies.

His stories always provide heroes. If the movie version of 'The Big Short” has any, it would be Carell's cantankerous Mark Baum - based on Steve Eisman, who headed FrontPoint Partners. He and his associates figure out how to profit from the bubble that's about to burst, but at least Baum feels bad about it.

'I thought we were better than this,” he confides, near tears, as the scale of the economic tragedy becomes clear.

See, though 'The Big Short” at times is laugh-out-loud funny, this movie deep in its heart is not a comedy. It's a morality tale - even if we all still haven't worked out the message.

'Truth is like poetry. And most people ******* hate poetry,” we're told.

At the end of the of picture, we're reminded only one banker - of all the bankers and investment folk who became rich, all the accounting firms who accepted their business and looked the other way, and all the government regulators who were asleep at the switch - went to jail.

Companies shut their doors, workers were tossed out onto the unemployment queues and nations were brought to their knees.

In all, $5 trillion was lost, the movie estimates.

Big banks continue to offer very similar mortgage packages, 'The Big Short” says, but sold under a different name.

Not so funny after all.

' Michael Chevy Castranova is enterprise and Sunday business editor of The Gazette. (319) 398-5873; michaelchevy.castranova@thegazette.com