Movie Review: Too Big to Fail

Premiers May 23
9 p.m. EST
(HBO)

Early on in , Dick Fuld tells his chief financial officer, Erin Callan, "Screw Warren Buffett—we will stand strong and eat Goldman Sachs's lunch!" It's the first of several lines that reaffirm the old adage that tragedy plus time equals comedy gold. The HBO movie, adapted from Andrew Ross Sorkin's tome of the same name, comes nearly three exhaustively forensic years after Lehman Brothers went bust. And as every HBO subscriber will know, Fuld ended up eating a lot of something else. Yet his mildly hysterical delusions, enhanced by age, are an amusing reminder of the heady months in 2008—at least for those who didn't own Lehman stock.

, which premieres on May 23, follows the same trajectory as Sorkin's book, from the collapse of Bear Stearns that spring to the rise of TARP in the fall. To the film's credit, it attempts to make many of these still-horrifying moments pretty funny—and squeezes them all into 98 minutes. While the movie doesn't shed much new light on the period, it offers one of the few pleasures left unfulfilled by the gusher of nonfiction thrillers, roman à clefs, wrist-slapping documentaries, and Oliver Stone. The bankers and government officials who rose to prominence in those months are depicted in all their glory and disgrace by real Hollywood actors—most of whom are far better-looking versions of the people they're portraying. (Tim Geithner is pretty handsome, but Billy Crudup? Really?) TARP groupies will delight in the film's attention to detail. Leon, the coffee cart guy parked outside Lehman's office building, gets a chance to extend his five minutes of fame. The hideous toupee worn by Matthew Modine—playing Merrill Lynch Chief Executive Officer John Thain—might be the worst fake movie hair since Burt Reynolds's heyday.