Max Greenfield wears an unidentified watch

About a third of the way into The Big Short, two young mortgage brokers sit across a table from a hedge fund and brag. Mark Baum's team has come down to south Florida to find out whether the housing market is as rotten as a Deutsche Bank salesman claimed, and the brokers cheerfully confirm it: they write loans for borrowers who cannot afford them, including immigrants who do not speak English, because the broker is paid up front and the default lands on someone else. Max Greenfield plays one of the two. Billy Magnussen plays the other.

Greenfield is dressed for the money, a dark suit and an open-collared shirt, and where his folded arm crosses his body the camera catches the watch on his wrist. It is a round case with a warm gold tone and a pale dial, worn on a dark strap, the lower edge clipped by the bottom of the frame. A reflection off the bright room sits dead on the crystal, so the dial comes back as a blank white disc, no logo and no hands, nothing to pin a name to. The watch is plainly there and plainly a dress watch, and it refuses to say what it is.

The refusal fits the film. The Big Short runs on numbers that nobody on screen will read straight, on credit ratings that are bought rather than earned. The one solid object the camera offers as proof of the broker's new money gives up nothing either. Adam McKay made the film in 2015 for Paramount on a fifty million dollar budget, and it won the Academy Award for adapted screenplay. Greenfield's broker gets a few minutes of screen time and a gold watch that never resolves into a brand. The loans he is joking about are the ones that bring the economy down.