THEY DIDN'T DROP THE BALL. THEY DROPPED THE BALL, KICKED THE COACH IN THE NUTS, AND TOOK A CRAP IN THE QUARTERBACK'S MOUTH: My open and notorious biases towards Curtis Hanson's book adaptations notwithstanding, I thought Too Big To Fail was a hell of a good attempt to tell the story it tried to tell.
It was, as Matt Zoller Seitz writes, an expert combination of explanatory narrative with more than a soupçon of "wealth porn". This is the story of the Serious Men Who Saved The World, which is the story Andrew Ross Sorkin told in his book of the same name (and yes, that was him as the press conference reporter), and if it didn't get sufficiently into the irony these are also largely the people who caused the mess, or explore alternate paths the crisis could have taken ... well, neither did the author. But if you want to see a movie in which TARP is sold as the least-bad--but-absolutely-necessary-option and the trio of Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner are portrayed as hard-working, noble pragmatists who did their best -- played by the not-bright-enough anchor from Broadcast News, Pig Vomit, and Stillwater's Russell Hammond -- this movie tells that story well, and whether it's the proper story to be told (as opposed to something more darkly comic, or tragic) is left for the history books -- or your comments.
Things I particularly liked: James Woods's Dick Fuld and Dan Hedaya's cameo-level appearance as Barney Frank; the big explanatory scene on credit default swaps; the explanatory parade of bankers before the big meeting at the NYC Fed; William Hurt's various stages of stubble; and that they kept in the Warren Buffett at Dairy Queen scene, because it really happened like that. (Berkshire Hathaway does own Dairy Queen, FWIW.)
