Not sure how many people know this about me, but I studied economics as an undergraduate and then got my MFA in film production. Most of the time, it's tough to reconcile how the two go together, but there are some movies out there that let two of my main interests overlap. The obvious, unbelievably quotable classic Wall Street comes to mind, and then films trying to be quotable like Wall Street... namely Boiler Room and Wall Street 2.
It's feels rare to have a movie about money not go for the Wall Street quotability factor, but the recently released Margin Call takes that chance and turns out spectacularly. In fact, the script by writer/director J.C. Chandor often gets praised for taking straightforward, no frills dialogue to an artform. But let's cover the Basics first.
The film stars Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Demi Moore, Paul Bettany, Zachary Quinto, Penn Badgley, Simon Baker, Stanley Tucci, and Mary McDonnell. The story takes place literally in the first 24 hours of the financial crisis as a fictional investment bank discovers just how screwed they set themselves up to be and tries to decide how to respond.
All of the actors turn in good performances with the slight but sometimes obvious separation between the movie vets and the TV stars. I was pleasantly surprised to see Demi Moore in this film because the last time I saw her in a Very Serious Movie About Grown Ups At Work, she was grabbing Michael Douglas' junk in the adaptation of Michael Chrichton's Disclosure. Here her work is far more subdued and intelligent, but I guess she and Michael Baker could be seen as the (very slightly) weaker links of the film.
Penn Badgley, Paul Bettany, and Zachary Quinto do a great job holding up the front half of the film while the "We're Screwed" puzzle gets cracked before handing it off to Jeremy Irons and Kevin Spacey to deal with the second half "How Do We Respond" moral slime realities.
While billed as a thriller, Margin Call isn't the type of thriller like The Firm with a Wilford "Diabetes" Brimley trying to convince the world he should absolutely be taken seriously as a killer. Margin Call stays completely in the realm of possibility. Everyone barks about how they need to get Stanely Tucci back ASAP, but there's no shadowy figure like in The Firm or the more recent Michael Clayton ready to drop the hammer. Instead Tucci felt free to say no and the more realistic buckets of cash acted as the carrot dangling at the end of the stick. While fictional, Margin Call felt very much like a peek behind one possible curtain at the start of the 2008 financial meltdown (J.C. Chandor's father worked at Merrill Lynch for nearly forty years, so that probably helped with the veracity).
As I mentioned, the script itself deserves some special praise as well. It's lean, skips the flowery speeches, and let's everyone say exactly what they need to say while still allowing the characters to have individual voices. I don't go for David Mamet style jerk-offs to the rhythms of words so that everyone sounds like stiff, speaking metronomes that never heard of a contraction (with the useless artificial cursing to substitute for real tough talk). I also don't go for the more tolerable set-ups and payoffs style of Aaron Sorkin (the opening five minutes of The Social Network physically caused me pain). So it was nice to experience a script that went in the other direction and did it really well.
One interesting note is that the script never completely dumbs itself down to let those who might be confused catch up. There are a few moments when one character gives the proverbial "explain this to me like I'm stupid" line, and what followed made it clear to the character in the film, but could leave laymen still a bit in the dark. I wasn't sure what to make of that at first, but the more I thought about it, the more that decision made sense. The point of the film isn't to explain the How behind the financial crisis, but to explore a bit of the Why. You don't need to know every detail to understand that investment banks (along with many others) acted unwisely to say the least. The second half "How Do We Respond" is obviously the heart of this film, and all you need to understand that is a moral compass.
In the end, I greatly enjoyed Margin Call. At 107 minutes, it's easy to get through, and the simultaneous theatrical and rental release makes it easy for areas that don't usually get smaller, independent films to take a look (I rented mine on the XBox). While Margin Call may not be as fun or melodramatic or quotable as Wall Street, it's actually better at getting to the heart of the matter.
Absolutely worth checking out, especially given how easy it is to rent. For a second opinion, here's a link to Margin Call's review in The New Yorker.
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