With income inequality dominating the race for the Democratic presidential nomination and billionaire Donald Trump touting his fortune as evidence of his virtue on the stump in the Republican race, America is awash in difficult conversations about money.
And in this environment, I’ve found myself returning to Adam McKay’s Oscar-nominated film about the financial crisis, “The Big Short,” and Showtime’s slickly engaging new series about the clash between a hedge-fund billionaire and a U.S. attorney, “Billions.”
What “Billions” and “The Big Short” have in common is the idea that very large amounts of money are, in and of themselves, morally neutral. But those piles can be applied in ways that are either moral or immoral, virtuous or selfish.
Part of what makes “Billions” genuinely intriguing is that it doesn’t make the easy mistake of suggesting that hedge-fund superstar Bobby Axelrod (“Homeland” veteran Damian Lewis) is either good or bad simply because he’s rich. Instead, the show is interested in how he uses money.
In one episode, Axelrod decides he wants his name on a university building. But because the naming rights have already been assigned, the school tells him he’ll have to talk to the original donors. Axelrod learns that the family is in deep debt and offers them what is effectively a buyout. And then the show turns what might have been an indulgence of Axelrod’s ego, the sight of a very wealthy man dropping a jaw-dropping, but to him inconsequential, amount of money on a whim, into something more complicated.
The patriarch of the family Axelrod is dealing with once got the younger man fired from his job caddying years ago. The family, of course, has no idea that their carelessness might ever have cost someone something that they really needed. As the deal is supposed to go down, Axelrod reveals that history and says he’ll pay the family less than what he promised, knowing their financial desperation will compel them to go through with it anyway. The story turns out to be about vengeance rather than vanity, new money punishing old wealth for sloth and a lack of consideration.
Later in the season, Axelrod moves to take over a snack-foods company that’s been slipping under a new CEO. And while his investment is partially a ploy too complicated to parse here to hit back at the father (Jeffrey DeMunn) of his nemesis, Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti), the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Axelrod’s turnaround plan for the company is fascinating. He wants to make the product taste better, cutting out chemical ingredients and returning to the original recipe. Axelrod is behaving in a petty fashion, but the result is rooted in quality and principle.
Part of what distinguishes Axelrod and Rhoades is Rhoades’s distaste for using money as a tool. Though his father is a brilliant investor, Rhoades keeps his money in a blind trust and abhors anything that might taint his political chances. When his father, on a whim, tries to pull a financial maneuver called a short squeeze on Axelrod in Sunday’s episode, Rhoades, furious, insists that his own father take a bath on the deal.
“A little more medicine,” Rhoades says, through clenched teeth, watching the stock in question sink until he gives his father permission to sell. In other circumstances, Rhoades’ rectitude might make him seem heroic. In “Billions,” though, his convictions make him seem a little narrow, even square, now that we’ve seen what money can do.
“Billions” was renewed for a second season shortly into its run and will probably keep riding its moral teeter-totter all the way until the show’s conclusion, whenever that day might come. But in slightly more than two hours, “The Big Short” comes to a more despairing conclusion.
The film follows a group of investors who come to believe that a housing bubble is about to burst, bringing down with it bonds created from big packages built from mortgages. But what initially seems like the deal of a lifetime comes to see like a terrible moral compromise.
“You just bet against the American economy,” Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt), a former trader who is helping two young investors with their short, tells them when they begin to celebrate their vision. “If we’re right, it means people lose homes, jobs, retirement savings, pensions. These aren’t just numbers. For every point unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die. Did you know that?”
And Ben is less of an activist than Mark Baum (Steve Carell), who comes to believe that his shorts are a way to punish people who are both stupid and greedy. But right at the moment when his bet is about to pay out, it becomes clear that government bailouts will prevent the kind of catastrophic agony Baum wanted to cause.
“The whole time we were wondering how the big banks could be so stupid. … They didn’t care. They knew the taxpayers had to bail ‘em out,” Baum laments. “I bet in a few years we’ll be doing what people always do when the economy goes south: blaming immigrants and poor people.”
Money, in “The Big Short,” is more powerful than the men who wield it. And no matter the moral ambitions of the people who know how to manipulate it, the drive to profit is more powerful than even the smartest bets.
“Making money is not like I thought it would be,” Mike Burry (Christian Bale), an eccentric but prescient hedge-fund manager, writes in a letter closing down his fund toward the end of “The Big Short.” “This business kills the part of life that is essential: the part that has nothing to do with business.”
That’s not a revelation that Bobby Axelrod will be reaching anytime soon. But wherever you land on the question of wealth and morality, the queasiness of both “Billions” and “The Big Short” feels essential and unsettling.