Too Big To Fail: Too Important To Fictionalize?

The past Monday night found me sitting down to watch the HBO premiere of Too Big To Fail, a film about the beginnings of the recent financial crisis. Based on the best-selling book by New York Times financial columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, the HBO film boasts an ace cast that includes William Hurt, Paul Giamatti, Billy Crudup, Topher Grace, James Woods, and Ed Asner. Seen largely from the perspective of former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson (William Hurt), the story centers on the government’s reaction to the meltdowns of both Lehman Brothers and AIG and the subsequent framing of TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program [I had to look that one up]).

via hbo.com

Personally, I found the film immensely informative. Not much of an economics buff, I knew only the rough outlines of the financial crisis. The film, however, is careful to keep the audience informed at each major (financial) plot point. Because it concentrates on so many nitpicky details and was all but bereft of any action, the film felt like a longer, slower version of a West Wing episode (without snappy dialogue from that other famous Sorkin). But while it might have been more entertaining if Ben Bernanke (Giamatti) and Paulson were slinging barbs across the breakfast table at one another, I doubt that it would have been quite as informative.

But beneath the seemingly harmless surface of this film, there is a lurking danger. Often, an issue with adaptations from the nonfiction page to the screen is that some of the truth in the real story is sacrificed for the purpose of entertainment. Something along these lines happened earlier in the past year with Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for David Fincher’s film The Social Network.

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In a great New York Magazine article by Mark Harris, Sorkin is quoted, “I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling.” Sorkin’s portrait of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is, after all, pretty nasty. Is he so terrible in reality? Accounts differ. I wish I could give you an easy answer. The real-life Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg’s “shafted” co-founder of Facebook, might not waver too much at Jesse Eisenberg’s neurotic, angry portrayal of his former friend. The consensus, however, is that Sorkin meant what he said when his “fidelity [is not] to the truth.” 

via imdb.com

As far as I’m concerned, the most accurate portrayal of Zuckerberg in mass media can be found in Lev Grossman’s Time 2010 Person of the Year profile. You can find the whole article here. I quote from it at length below:

“The Social Network is a rich, dramatic portrait of a furious, socially handicapped genius who spits corrosive monologues in a monotone to hide his inner pain. This character bears almost no resemblance to the actual Mark Zuckerberg. The reality is much more complicated.

The Zuckerberg of the movie is a simple creature of clear motivations: he uses his outsize gifts as a programmer to acquire girls, money and party invitations. This is a fiction. In reality, Zuckerberg already had the girl: Priscilla Chan, who is now a third-year med student at University of California, San Francisco. They met at Harvard seven years ago, before he started Facebook. Now they live together in Palo Alto.

As for money, his indifference to it is almost pathological. His lifestyle is modest by most standards but monastic for someone whose personal fortune was estimated by Forbes at $6.9 billion, a number that puts him ahead of his Palo Alto neighbor (and fellow college dropout) Steve Jobs. Zuckerberg lives near his office in a house that he rents. He works constantly; his only current hobby is studying Chinese. He drives a black Acura TSX, which for a billionaire is the automotive equivalent of a hair shirt. For Thanksgiving break, he took his family to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando. He bought a wand at Ollivander’s.”

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The question here is no longer whether or not the film fictionalized Zuckerberg’s life (it did), but rather what that means for us as viewers. I know for a fact that many people walked away from the film thinking less of Zuckerberg. (It was hard not to.) But, after reading a few reviews of the film that noted the fictionalized aspects of the story, I came around to the fact that Sorkin and Fincher were having some fun with Zuckerberg’s story.

Can that be dangerous?

One review I found—by Yahoo! Contributor Gretchen Lee Bourquin—was pretty explicit in its judgment of Zuckerberg: “Eisenberg's potrayal of Zuckerberg was spot on and consistent throughout the movie, and kept me thinking how much he really was a jerk, and although his brains may be worth billions, it doesn't mean he can't fall on his face like the rest of us.”

When we watch or read nonfiction, especially those that suggest an “informative edge” (I’m not thinking about historical dramas, e.g. The King’s Speech [although there’s an entirely different discussion to be made about this point]), we’ve got to keep our wits about us. I watched Too Big To Fail because I thought I might gain some insight into what was happening behind the scenes of the crash. Did I? I thought so. I doubt that director Chris Hanson would play with too much of the detail…but you’ve always got to be careful. The thing is...I don’t doubt that HBO wants to entertain us more than it wants to inform us.

See more:

Grossman, Lev. “Person of the Year 2010: Mark Zuckerberg.” Time.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037183_2037185-1,00.html

Harris, Mark. “Inventing Facebook.” New York Magazine. http://nymag.com/movies/features/68319/

Too Big To Fail homepage: http://www.hbo.com/movies/too-big-to-fail/index.html