American Casino opens with text on the screen: The U.S. government has pledged over $12 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers to bail out Wall Street. Most people would like to know why.

The decline in the American (and world) economy began with the bursting of the housing bubble which was overinflated with sub-prime loans; that is, mortgages with above-average risk of default. This film tries to explain the ever-expanding consequences of the practice of having so many sub-prime mortgages. It uses (briefly) the metaphor of a casino to imply that this is a matter of high level economic gambling by banks and investors. There is no doubt an element of that, but the issue is far more complex than that metaphor (or the film) establishes.

The first half hour of the film basically lays out and explains the financial element of all this—mortgages, Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), deregulation of the securities industry, ratings of bonds, "liar loans," credit default swaps (that pay-off for people who "bet" against people repaying their loans). All of these are involved in what created the financial crisis. We see a bit of how the demand by investors for CDOs led to banks and brokers trying to write more and more mortgages—and those writing the mortgages didn't really care if the mortgages were sound because they got their money up front.

The second half hour puts a human face on the problem. It focuses on three African-Americans in Baltimore whose homes had been or were in the process of being foreclosed. These are middle-class people with jobs who, because of surprises in their loans or changes in their circumstances, ended up with mortgages far beyond their ability to pay.

It is intentional that African-Americans were chosen for this. One of the theses of the film is that financial institutions targeted minority groups with sub-prime loans that they could not fully understand and had a high likelihood of not repaying. They give evidence of this charge, but never to the level of proving the charge.

While the film manages to cover a difficult subject, it never really gets beyond the surface. To be sure, there is greed involved—but then, like it or not, greed is a major element of economics. We never really get to know who is responsible. There just seems to be a shadowy Wall Street cabal that doesn't care about anyone but themselves and their gain. That is surely an oversimplification.

Therein lies the main problem with American Casino—oversimplification. In its effort to make the difficult issues understandable, it fails to bring in the complex reasons behind deregulation, CDOs, swaps and the whole financial industry. Perhaps each of those deserve condemnation, but the film doesn't give us enough of an economics lesson to make such a judgment. It is business and it is about profit. The film however wants to make it only about victims and wants us to see ourselves (as taxpayers) as victims as well.