Margin Call
Now playing at Fifth Avenue
You can't spit a popcorn husk in the multiplex these days and not hit a film about the financial crisis.
Foreclosure signs still litter the North American landscape, fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, whose ripples are still being felt. With everyone from busboy to CEO being affected, it makes the topic of what went wrong popular fodder for films, from 2010's excellent documentary Inside Job, to last week's crime caper Tower Heist.
Margin Call is a deliberately claustrophobic look at the hours preceding the economic meltdown at one Wall Street firm.
In a business where the two things guaranteed to adorn an executive's desk are a photo of the family he never sees and a bottle of Pepto Bismol, we watch as the investment firm culls 80 per cent of its work force in one day. After enduring the indignity of being fired in a fishbowl office, Eric (Stanley Tucci) is further shamed by being escorted out of the building after 19 years of service. It's a long, painfully quiet march out to the elevator.
Eric does a last-minute hand-off out the elevator door, passing a flash drive to an entry-level analyst with the warning "be careful." Peter (Zachary Quinto) was a rocket scientist at MIT before heading to the firm, and it only takes him a few hours of overtime to fill the gaps in Eric's dismal market projection.
Peter calls his superior, the ice-cold Will Emerson (Paul Bettany) who, in turn, calls his boss, Sam (Kevin Spacey). Sam calls Jared Cohen (The Mentalist's Simon Baker), the 40-year-old who runs the show. But, like those matryoshka dolls, there's always another head popping up: the all-powerful John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) helicopters in for an emergency meeting with the board, including a risk management analyst played by Demi Moore.
"It's going to get worse before it gets better," says Sam. "Much."
This is an intimate look at men and women standing on the precipice of 2008's financial meltdown, a cataclysm they helped create. Their solution? To keep mum and unload as much of the product as possible before anyone notices to unwitting investors who will be bankrupted by a single phonecall.
"If you do this, you're killing the market for years and you're selling stuff you know to be worthless," says Sam, the only one who seems to have a conscience under all that slick. "No one will ever trust you again, you knowingly putting people out of business," he says during his rationale to John. "It's just money, it's made up," John replies coolly, while tearing into a steak dinner.
You don't need to understand the numbers to understand the urgency. Margin Call does a great job of condensing the crisis into the microcosm of one office, during one 24-hour period. A smart script by first-time director J.C. Chandor avoids outright villainy, with characters caught up in an unprecedented moral quagmire. Excellent performances all around.
"Look at these people, wandering around with no idea what's about to happen to them," says 23-year-old trader Seth (Penn Badgley). It's funny until you realize that those people are us.
