Economic Crisis Unfurls In Hushed Suspense.

It can't be easy to create a financial thriller. There's no blood, there are (usually) no bodies. How do you create excitement when most of the action consists of middle-aged white men in conservative suits talking on the phone, and the closest thing to a car chase is a stately procession of big black Town Cars? How often can you show people peering at spreadsheets and recoiling in alarm? What do you do when the scandal itself might as well be labeled ''Too Complicated to Understand''? The HBO film ''Too Big to Fail,'' based on the book of the same name by the reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times, about the financial crisis of 2008, uses every cinematic trick in the book, but ultimately succeeds because we know that the danger was real. One way to create an atmosphere of crisis is simply to have your characters assert that it's a crisis. In ''Too Big to Fail,'' directed by Curtis Hanson (''L.A. Confidential''), people are always saying things like, ''If we don't do this now, we won't have an economy on Monday.'' There's also a lot of staring soulfully through windows or into mirrors. The hero of Mr. Sorkin's version of events, Treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., played by William Hurt, indicates the terrible stress he's under by talking ever-more softly. The Federal Reserve chairman Ben S. Bernanke, played by Paul Giamatti, does the same. As things get worse, the conversation at their weekly breakfast meetings degenerates into a low rumble. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]