'The Big Short' is the feel-bad feel-good movie of the year

The Big Short reminds me of a great character actor playing against type, and I mean that as a compliment.

Director Adam McKay, whose film this unabashedly is, has made a name for himself by making smart comedies about dumb people.

Now, for the first time, he's making a film where the characters are as clever as he is and it's an entertaining change of pace.

The movie does have one big, glaring flaw however, it's basically asking you to root for a bunch of already wealthy white guys who got richer by predicting the pain of far more disadvantaged people -- but I'll get to that in a minute.

McKay takes great pains to make an accessible movie about the financial meltdown of 2007-2008, and for the most part he succeeds. He's aided by a terrific cast with the best turns coming from a moving Steve Carrell, as an honest and righteous hedge fund manager, and a surprisingly funny Ryan Gosling who shows great comic timing as a Wall Street shark with some scruples. Christian Bale's performance was a little too mannered for me at first, but he grew on me as the movie progressed.

They all play men who saw the housing bubble early and bet against the big banks. It's a remarkable story, told with lots of energy and justified rage by McKay. In the film's most ingenious gimmick, he periodically breaks the fourth wall, either with the Gosling character, or a prominent celebrity making a cameo to break down and explain what exactly all these financial wizards are talking about.

As clever as these bits are, I must admit I still had trouble wrapping my puny brain around some of the ins and outs of the financial schemes at play in this movie. But I was never bored, nor was I so overwhelmed by the narrative that I couldn't enjoy myself.

The problem with The Big Short though is that for all its valiant effort to find heroes worth cheering for, it's an undeniably bleak picture -- as its closing titles confirm, another collapse could very well be coming, and most of the people seeing this film won't be reaping any windfalls.

Steve Carrell in The Big Short

The movie does point out the moral incongruity of betting on people's inability to pay their mortgages, most effectively in a well-played scene featuring Brad Pitt as a former Wall Street big shot who voluntarily backed out of the game.

But the film does feel a little lacking in this regard. It's not as immoral as the predatory lenders it portrays but I do think it's guiltier than a movie that is sometimes vilified -- The Wolf of Wall Street -- of showing the allure of playing the markets, rather than showing its collateral damage.

Still, this is an important film, if not my favorite film I've seen this year. I appreciated the presence of Adepero Oduye, but this is a such a white male-dominated film (Marisa Tomei is largely wasted as Carrell's wife) that it left something of a bad taste in my mouth.

And yet I admire the hell out of a relatively mainstream crowd-pleasing comedy-drama that takes dead aim at our country's most powerful financial institutions and has the audacity to name names. I think McKay wants us to leave the theater a little angry, a little indignant and, by that measure, his film is a rousing, likely hit.