Margin Call. Written and directed by J.C. Chandor. Starring Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Zachary Quinto and Jeremy Irons. Rating: 8 (out of 10)
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, and the ripples are still being felt from the 2008 financial crisis. Everyone from busboy to CEO being affected, that 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 entrylevel 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 (Simon Baker, The Mentalist), 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 Risk Management analyst Sara Robertson (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, before anyone notices unload as much of the product as possible to unwitting investors who will be bankrupted by a single phone call.
"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're 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 'round.
"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.
