In HBO’s ‘Too Big To Fail,’ The Heroes Are Really Zeroes

HBO's "Too Big To Fail"—I just caught up with it last night; thank you, HBO On Demand—is extraordinarily revealing about the financial crisis. Only its revelations are almost entirely inadvertent.

The movie is set up in the Hollywood conventional way: A gang of misfits, each with a special expertise, is brought together for an impossible mission. There's Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, steely eyed at the moment of truth. There's New York Federal Reserve head Timothy Geithner, the athlete (he doesn't just jog, but also plays what appears to be squash). And then there's Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, the professor with a heart of gold and secret knowledge of the Great Depression.

Ostensibly it's a story of their success against all odds. Michael Kinsley, reviewing the movie in the New York Times, labeled Hank Paulson [1] the "hero" of the account.

Except that the movie actually depicts something entirely different: failure upon failure. "Too Big To Fail" The Movie isn't the story of how the Three Musketeers saved the global economy. It's a story of how the three didn't see the financial crisis coming; hadn't prepared for it; made mistake after mistake as it was cresting; and then, in their moment of triumph, made their most colossal blunder of all.

That, it turns out (whether or not "Too Big To Fail" knows it), is the true story of the financial crisis.

How much did Curtis Hanson and the writers mean for that to be the story? Throughout, the characters drop hints about their missteps, but the plot unfolds like a financial "Die Hard," with our intrepid heroes battling fiendishly powerful forces toward a happy ending. (Full disclosure in this era of transparency: I write a regular column [2] for DealBook, the New York Times section edited by Andrew Ross Sorkin, the reporter upon whose book [3] the movie was based.)

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