As with many aspects of reality, Wall Street has been fundamentally romanticized in how it has been depicted on screen in Hollywood productions. Films like The Wolf of Wall Street and American Psycho may attempt to be more critical in their analysis of the insidious ways in which capitalism takes advantage of vulnerable people, but Hollywood is still guilty of depicting a version of Wall Street that is much more fantastical than the hard truths seem to suggest. Many of these more innocent depictions of Wall Street have felt even less relevant in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, in which evidence pointed to years of fraud and corruption on the part of stockbrokers. Although there have been many attempts to cope with these revelations in fictional films, the Academy Award-winning documentary Inside Job offered a comprehensive look at the origin of the 2008 financial collapse.
What Is ‘Inside Job’ About?
Written and directed by acclaimed documentary filmmaker Charles Ferguson, Inside Job examines the historical events that led up to the 2008 crash, exploring how various shifts in domestic policy resulted in an uneven market that was vulnerable to a significant upheaval. Although the complex ways in which modern finances work may seem too challenging for anyone without an advanced degree to understand, Ferguson is able to explore the logical step-by-step process of what caused the tension, complete with a compelling voice-over from Matt Damon as the narrator. Although Ferguson begins by examining the effects of bank privatization in Iceland, he turns his abstract into a historical epic once he turns his focus to the history of the United States’ financial institutions.
Related
This ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ Scene Solidifies Martin Scorsese’s Vision for the Film
One of the calmer scenes in ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ helped shape the outlook of Scorsese’s film
Inside Job conveniently divides itself into five different segments; one section examines the development of regulations in the financial industry over the course of the 20th century, another examines the rise of the “bubble” that led to structured class divisions, and the next describes how the rise of Credit Default Swaps led to an inherently unstable market. The fourth segment explored the lack of accountability on the part of leading banks, while the final section examined why 2008 was the tipping point in which the world fell into recession. Despite the complexity of the language, there’s nothing ambiguous about the assertions that Ferguson makes at the end of the film, as the blame is squarely placed on the institutions that lobbied the government to give them cuts and avoid facing real consequences for their actions.
Why Is ‘Inside Job’ a Great Wall Street Movie?
A commonality within films about Wall Street is that they point to a singular villain as being the primary issue, such as Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) in The Wolf of Wall Street or Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas) in Wall Street. While it may be dramatically satisfying to pin the blame for these larger issues on a skeevy antagonist, Inside Job shows that it is the system itself that is to blame, as the decisions made on Wall Street affect thousands of citizens who have no stake in what is being traded in New York. Inside Job looks at the fundamental disparity at hand; it is those that cause the most damage that are often given the lightest sentences, and those with the least power that have their lives unraveled as a result.
Inside Job is a film that continues to grow in relevance with each passing year, as the financial market has still not fully recovered from the dramatic events of 2008. Considering that the film was released only shortly after the crash itself, there was a limit to how much understanding Ferguson had on the way that the world would recover; Inside Job speculated that the government would offer bailouts to banks in place of actually instituting any fundamental changes that would prevent the prevalence of fraud, and that is exactly what happened. While it is a fact-based documentary with innumerable charts and figures that it throws out, Inside Job is perhaps far scarier than any body horror film has ever been.
- Release Date
- October 8, 2010
- Director
- Charles Ferguson
- Cast
- Matt Damon , Gylfi Zoega , Andri Snær Magnason , Sigridur Benediktsdottir , Paul Volcker , Dominique Strauss-Kahn
- Runtime
- 120
- Main Genre
- Documentary
- Writers
- Charles Ferguson , Chad Beck , Adam Bolt
Inside Job is currently available to rent or buy on Prime Video in the U.S.
