I saw “The Big Short” last night and it hit me harder and more personally than I expected. It is a very good movie about the credit and housing bubble collapse that led to the Great Recession of 2008 and beyond. I left the theater feeling sad and a bit.

Steve Carell and Ryan Gosling were especially powerful in their portrays of two of the four financiers who saw what no one else saw – the housing mortgage mortgage was a fraud and a sham, a  vast banking bubble built on greed and denial. Against all advice, they decided to beat the big banks at their own game.

They bet against the mortgage market.

And they won big.

The movie is an adaptation of Michael Lewis’s book of the same name, it is a movie with a conscience, but also a film of wit and energy. For the first time, I actually understand what happened and why.

The film is about greed and the almost numbing lack of foresight  and integrity on the part of the media, the government, the regulators, bond raters, traders, and even the banks themselves.The recession, as many of you reading this know only too well, devastated the economy and the lives of many millions of people, and the anger and trauma of that time echo through the country today, especially in the anger and mistrust of authority that are infecting the political system.

The movie was surprisingly personal for me.

I was traveling on a book tour in September of 2008, I remember seeing people staring open-mouthed at airport TV monitors crying openly or staring in shock. My life changed on that day, my agent called me up and told me that the publishing world as I knew it had just been destroyed, and nothing about my writing life would ever be the same.

It took me longer to figure out the collapse of the housing market would cost me the first Bedlam Farm, destroy my savings and financial security and nearly force me out of my new home as well. On so many levels, my life was never the same. I don’t know anyone who wasn’t deeply affected by the havoc the big banks wreaked on the economy and our lives.

More than eight million people lost their jobs,  a million people lost their homes, and the lives of almost every creative person in the country became immeasurably more difficult, even frightening. The gap between the rich and everyone else began to widen dramatically after 2008, the catastrophe has probably touched the lives of almost every American but the now famous one percent.

It took me a long time to realize that people with power and money are not necessarily smarter than anyone else. They are often blinded by their own greed and delusions. It is a treat to see the characters in the movie come slowly to see that yes, the powers that be can be both dumb and blind. They sometimes live in the clouds. Or as one of the characters saw it, the banks were guilty either of stupidity or fraud.  And nobody involved seemed to know the difference.

It is still a shock and mystery to me that no one was ever punished or held accountable for all that damage, and the banks seem to be doing almost exactly the same thing again, raking in billions on risky financial bond speculations, according to the financial press.

It disturbs me to see the hatred sweeping across the civic landscape, much of it seems to have sprung directly from the collapse of 2008. So many people lost faith in the institutions of government, so many people felt betrayed, so many people were hurt. Sometimes, evil conspiracies seemed the only logical explanation.

As Carell’s agonized character put it, the banks have been screwing people for years. This time, he vowed, they wouldn’t get away with it. He was right about the mortgage market, but wrong about the banks. They not only got away with it, they passed out tens of millions of dollars in fat bonuses the next year. And they are siphoning off billions of dollars again.

The movie is two hours and ten minutes long. It moves quickly, it does an especially ingenious, even brilliant job of explaining the elaborate system of swaps, sloppy and fraudulent banking short buys and wild speculation that led to the financial disaster. It makes it clear that the system of government and oversight failed on almost every conceivable level to protect the people from capitalism run completely amok.

“The Big Short” makes a strong case for government oversight, and the film wonders – through its characters – how it could possibly be that no one was punished or even investigated for what appear to be crimes of fraud and misrepresentation. Surely, said one of the character, someone would go to jail, the banks would be broken up, the system changed.

But none of these things happened, and that is the hopeless part of the film. I was entertained, for sure. I learned a great deal about what happened to me and why, but the movie did leave me without much hope, or to feel reassured that it won’t happen again. Or that anyone is really watching.

For me, government works best when it protects the people from harm, from predators within and without.  And journalism works best when it uncovers the truth. Both failed here. Foreign terrorists have never done as much damage to most of us as the greedy marauders on Wall Street, and who is going to protect us from them?

This is fast-paced, often funny and polished movie without any  happy ending. The truth about us and our world comes as a slap in the face sometimes, but one of those slaps we need.

I confess that the movie turned out to be very personal for me, the recession turned my life upside down, and I am dealing with it still. But I have no regrets about seeing it and I can recommend it enthusiastically.

In fact, I recommend the movie highly, it is a movie every citizen ought to see and ponder. It is as entertaining as it can be and Adam McKay deserves great credit for making a movie that is also as honest as it could be.