Christian Bale and Ryan Gosling‘s $133 million movie accurately depicts what Wall Street life is like, with an expert giving it a high score. The two stars are well-known for a number of movies that defined their careers in the 2000s and 2010s, many of them dramas where they portrayed memorable characters. While Bale was best known for his role as Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight trilogy, he also had more grounded roles, like Dicky Eklund in the 2010 biopic The Fighter, and as Dan Evans in 2007’s western action film 3:10 to Yuma.

Gosling has also had various roles in dramas across a mulтιтude of genres, such as Noah Calhoun in the 2004 romance movie The Notebook, alongside other romantic dramas like 2010’s Blue Valentine. However, he also proved himself a versatile actor with movies like the comedy-drama Lars and the Real Girl, later becoming known for more serious roles like in 2010’s Drive. Bale and Gosling’s best movies are defined by their abilities to become unique, interesting characters, including those that are based on real-world events.

The Big Short Gets A High Accuracy Score From Former Wall Street Trader

The 2015 Drama Has Many Realistic Attributes

According to a former trader, Bale and Gosling’s only movie together, The Big Short, is an accurate representation of Wall Street life, especially during the 2008 financial crisis. Based on Michael Lewis’ non-fiction book of the same name, the movie follows various people who were involved in the global event, particularly focusing on the financial aspects of what transpired. Bale portrays Michael Burry in The Big Short, an investor who shorted the housing market years before the crisis, and Gosling plays Jared Vennett, a Deutsche Bank salesman who sells Burry’s credit swaps for himself.

Speaking with Insider on their series How Real Is It?, former Wall Street trader Jared Dillian explained just how accurate The Big Short is in portraying the 2008 financial crisis from a financial perspective. Starting at 2:12, he explains how Bale portrayed Burry accurately to real life, while explaining the real financial terms being used by cameo celebrities like Margot Robbie and Selena Gomez to explain various parts of the film. Knowing some figures in real life, Dillian said their portrayal was realistic, giving it an eight out of 10 for accuracy. Check out what he said below:

You know, the idea of Michael Burry as an eccentric hedge fund manager, making calls that he wants to short the housing market, I think that’s very realistic. The term “short” is used in general terms to describe betting against anything. So, if you want to bet that a stock is going down, what you do is you borrow the stock, and then you sell it, and you wait for the price to go down, and then you buy it back, and then you return the stock that you bought.

[Margot Robbie]’s description of it is pretty good. So what she’s talking about here is the process of securitization. Taking a pool of mortgages and putting them into bonds. And as she says in the clip, this became so popular that pretty much every mortgage in the country had been securitized. So they were looking for other things to securitize, so less credit-worthy mortgages.

For a bunch of bankers and traders to be in the conference room talking about a trade, that’s pretty common. The use of Jenga blocks, like, I’ve never seen visual aids in one of these conversations, but for sure, yeah, that could happen. In these CDO’s, Collaterized Obligations, you had a bunch of tranches of various credit qualities, and you had Triple A [AAA] at the top. They said, “Look, we can package these in such a way that, even though they’re risky on an individual basis, they’re less risky when you pool them together. That turned out not to be true.

Really, up until that point, the US housing market had never been correlated. You would have a Bull Market in New York, you would have a Bear Market in LA, you would have a Bull Market in Minneanapolis, and it was doing different things at different times. Well, the problem was is that…the stuff in the Triple A tranch, which was never supposed to fail, suddenly became correlated and it failed all at once.

Obviously, Lehman Brothers had a big role in the financial crisis. I did not, on an individual level, I was in equities, I was trading ETFs, I was totally removed from all the financial engineering and unicorn **** that was going on in the firm. Basically, Lehman Brothers’ management made a big bet on real estate and mortgages. And not just on securities, but also on physical real estate. At the time of the bankruptcy, the firm owned about $40 billion worth of real estate. And that made it almost impossible to bail out, because the ᴀssets were so iliquid at the time of the bankruptcy.

I would give it an 8 in terms of realism. I know some of the people involved that are portrayed in this movie, and it’s reasonably accurate.

What The Big Short’s Wall Street Accuracy Says About The Movie

A Realistic Portrayal Of The Financial Crisis

Dillian’s ᴀssessment of the movie isn’t surprising, given the movie earned critical acclaim when it was released. The Big Short currently sits at a certified fresh 89% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, making it one of the most well-received movies in Bale and Gosling‘s career. The two actors’ characters being so entwined and realistic also helped make the movie the success that it’s become, an important factor that showcased the financial crisis in a realistic way that clearly resonated with critics.

Source: Insider/YouTube