Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
12/22/11
Most
of us barely know how to balance our checkbooks, let alone keep up with
the big boys in the high-stakes financial games played on Wall Street.
But we do know this much: late in the last decade, the country was
filled with greedy fools who came up with legitimized names for glorified
dog track bets on whether people with no money would pay their mortgages
or not that knocked us into an economic tailspin from which the average
person has yet to recover. Because it’s almost impossible to understand
the math of how the hole was dug, the movies have been slow to engage the
seemingly uncinematic fiscal meltdown, with only Oliver Stone’s Wall
Street: Money Never Sleeps taking an unsuccessful stab at the
topic. Writer/Director J.C. Chandor changes that with his gripping
Margin Call, which eschews the calculations and sticks to the psychology,
examining through the prism of a group of investment bankers at a fictionalized
firm at the moment it all went wrong the hows and whys that sent us into
this tailspin. Jam-packed with great actors delivering the goods,
Margin Call feels like an end-of-the-world thriller despite containing
nary a special effect (aside from the presence of stars who’ve played Spock
and Lex Luthor): appropriate, since it makes clear just how easy
it is for a greedy few to make life very difficult for the greedy many
who have neither clue how nor desire to keep them in check.
At
an unnamed New York Investment Firm, human resources sweeps through the
building, laying off almost eighty percent of the workforce. Only
two employees survive in the Risk department, relative newcomers Peter
Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) and Seth Bregman (Penn Badgley). One of
the ones who doesn’t make the cut is their boss Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci),
who complains that he was working on something very important, something
he hands off to Peter on a flash drive with a warning: “Be careful”.
That gets his attention and just after the rest of the office has gone
home for the night, the surviving analyst finishes the project… and immediately
calls Seth to grab their de facto supervisor Will Emmerson (Paul Bettany)
and get back to the office. He shows them a program that compares
the firm’s current strategy of packaging mortgages into risky securities
against historical models and concludes that market forces had quietly
drifted outside acceptable parameters and for over two weeks the company
has been headed down a path that would lead to losses in their department
alone greater than the entire value of the company. The next call
is to Will’s boss, the head of the floor Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), who’s
hemorrhaging money into health care to keep his dying dog alive.
Sam knows they need to get Eric back, but the company turned off his cell
phone and his wife says he hasn’t come back since being fired. As
Peter and Seth search the city for him, Sam kicks the problem up to Jared
Cohen (Simon Baker), who’s been quietly rebuffing the gentle warnings of
Eric’s supervisor Sarah Robertson (Demi Moore) for some time. Once
she agrees that the numbers are catastrophic, the call is placed to CEO
John Tuld (Jeremy Irons). And Tuld will come to a decision with grave
consequences for not just his firm, but the entire country.
I don’t
know that I’ve ever seen a movie that so relentlessly models its plot after
the corporate concept of Chain of Command, but Margin Call does
a tremendous job of making the escalation in pay grades mirror the escalation
of the crisis: the higher up you get, the more frighteningly calm
the power players are that no matter how all this shakes out, they will
land on their feet. But as good as Chandor and his cast are at summoning
a unique kind of economic doomsday, what makes Call special is the
way it takes advantage of these 36 hours in the pressure cooker to examine
the backgrounds and worldviews of the kind of people who played this high
stakes poker game with our futures. Scenes like the one where Emmerson
lays out how easy it is to spend a 2.5 million dollar annual salary or
Dale calculates how much value a bridge he built in a previous career as
an engineer brought to the world vs the unspoken worthlessness of moving
dollars around computers are pure gold in the hands of the movie’s peerlessly
talented cast.
It’s
amazing how most of us work for corporations, yet we can’t seem to internalize
that the fundamental ruthlessness we work with every day is just as present
in the ones we deal with as customers. No investment bank is really
on your side: at the end of the day, they will tell you anything
to get you to do what benefits their bottom line, and that lesson of the
financial collapse is the basic truth on display here. Several of
the characters have self-serving speeches about how the customers deserve
what they get because of their own greed, and those things are true.
But if greed, for lack of a better word, can be good when it motivates
people to strive to create better products and services or to earn a better
standard of living through hard work, greed for a miraculous quick fix
that allows you to mortgage your house for a great new deck… well that’s
just stupid and even those of us who didn’t buy a single security or take
out a single mortgage are still paying for it.
Of
course, we’re also paying even when the stocks are riding high because
Wall Street has become THE destination for the brightest minds in the country,
and Margin Call is acutely aware that while rocket scientists like
Sullivan and engineers like Dale are keeping the plates spinning, their
bosses have no idea how their complex financial schemes actually work.
And as for the rockets and bridges… well, whose deck did they ever pay
for? What Chandor’s script does that’s so refreshingly complex is
to simply lay all this out there for us to observe: some of Margin
Call’s characters have crises of conscience in the later scenes, but
they’ve nothing to do with the larger issues in play, only with their own
jobs and whether there are, at last, any ethics at all when money is at
stake.
The
cast’s resumes are superb, and their work here measures up. Spacey
has played many a Guy With an Office in his career, but he’s rarely done
such a great job of showing you the difference between the faces such a
man shows his underlings, his peers and his superiors. Bettany has
a special gift for layabouts, and his Emmerson is intriguing not just in
how effectively he’s just along for the ride at the firm, but also as he’s
constantly processing rationalizations that make everything OK. Known
for playing harsh characters like Heroes’ Sylar or the angry young
Spock from the Star Trek reboot, Quinto is
impressively guileless here: Peter is the only character in the movie
who gives the same kind of thought to the people who’ll be affected by
the day’s events as he gives to himself. Badgely effectively takes
the opposite tact, as the guy who literally weeps at the thought that he’ll
lose his spot on the fast track.
While
Baker and Moore have upper-management ice water in their veins, Irons brings
something unexpected yet likely true-to-life to his performance as the
CEO. Tuld is drunk with power, to be sure, but it makes him tipsy
more than megalomaniacal: the guy’s primary job function is to make
sweeping, heartless decisions and as such he’s almost charmingly indifferent
to their effect on anything but the company’s bottom line. Of course,
he’s got all the money, so what does he really care? Tucci does a
sensational job showing us clearly how his character’s conscience waxes
and wanes depending on how much the company is paying him at any given
moment.
Produced
for just three million dollars thanks to a cast (some of whom would command
more than that themselves for a major studio movie) agreeing to work for
relative peanuts, Margin Call is a model of narrative economy, simply
observing a group of characters during a crisis and letting them reveal
themselves and their world to us. It’s an uncommonly gripping story
about a topic few of us understand. Of course, that’s how we got
into this trouble in the first place. |
