Too Big to Fail

The 2008 financial collapse told from Washington and Wall Street. The source is Andrew Ross Sorkin's book of the same title, scripted by Peter Gould and directed by Curtis Hanson. It concentrates on the weeks leading to the fall of Lehman Brothers and takes place almost entirely in meeting rooms: phone calls, bankers refusing to rescue one another, and a treasury secretary trying to get them around one table. What is interesting about the telling is that it looks for no hero. Nobody solves the crisis; they postpone a larger collapse, and the closing text states the price of that. William Hurt plays Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Paul Giamatti is Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, Billy Crudup is Timothy Geithner and James Woods is Lehman's Dick Fuld. It was made for HBO. Who it is for: viewers who want the crisis as a decision-making process and do not mind dense dialogue. Who it is not for: anyone who wants to see what the crisis meant on the street. Nobody in it loses a house; everything is seen through the people assembling the bailout, and that vantage was criticised for treating them far too sympathetically.