This is the kind of film somebody made to get laid. Every scene, every shot, every syllable says, “look at how clever I am. Aren’t I clever?” J.C. Chandor — here’s your golden opportunity to tell us how and why the economy tanked, in dramatic not documentary form, and you’ve used it to let us know how smart you are. What passes for entertainment these days?
Margin Call covers a critical 36-hour period in a major Manhattan trading firm. The hero, the everyman, to walk us through the recent Wall Street disaster, is Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto). Just how much of an everyman is Peter? He’s a 28-year-old single former rocket scientist (gave it up for the higher paycheck) workaholic who earns a quarter of a million dollars per annum and spends the very rare moments away from his desk in bars and strip clubs. His biggest flaw is an unawareness of exactly what grotesque salaries his co-workers are earning. Let me repeat: this is the most relatable character in the cast.
The film begins with a gutting of the company’s workforce and gets steadily worse. The details are important: the experience-poor newbies are scared silly, the hitmen don’t know their targets, the cynical middle-manager Will (Paul Bettany) earns $2.5 M per year, but doesn’t seem to have an office. I guess that’s only for the $3 M guys. There are two constant themes running through this film. The first is the feeling of monopoly money being thrown around by average Joes who are about as average as Derek Jeter. There are expense accounts for hookers; multi-million deals are made in seconds. The bigger theme is passing the buck. Nobody caused the collapse? “The formula is broke” is said several times. This formula, a specifically created business mechanism to enhance company profit, is alluded to, but never detailed. Hence, our players can pass off the fact they followed formula and now the company is going to go bankrupt despite best efforts. Margin Call here has almost a critical failure to address reality: the formula wasn’t broken, it was misengineered, deliberately and purposefully, by a handful of assholes who used it to get ultra-rich and the expense of, well, everybody else in the world.
For an apologist film, Margin Call sure doesn’t apologize much. Mostly it just talks over your head. Absolutely loved the part where 10-figure CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) asks the young ace Peter to explain, “as if you’re talking to a Golden Retriever.” I sit back with a satisfied grin. Finally we’re going to get an explanation. Exposition City, population: me. And in the dumbed –down six-year-old talk, we still get phrases like “mortgage-backed securities” and “tiered asset packaging.” Yeah, this is a film for the people.
Of course, this is the problem with the financial crisis, isn’t it? To fully explain it requires a lecture and an audience with a reasonable IQ. The mere fact that average Americans will never understand where their equity went is why Fox news is so powerful. As I understand it, and I could be way off here because this film ain’t easy, the dilemma of Margin Call is the following: suppose you sold things and you suddenly realized the things you sold had no intrinsic value –but for now you were the only one who knew that—and now suppose you owned not one or two of these things, but trillions of them, so many that if everybody suddenly found out the things had no value, the economy would collapse. What do you do? What is the honorable thing to do? The companies that discovered said dilemma generally chose to sell everything as quickly as possible before anybody noticed something was very wrong. This is clearly unethical and the crux to Margin Call. Alas, what is the right thing, the ethical thing, to do? Ah. Wall Street, we have a problem.
Rated R, 107 Minutes
D: J.C. Chandor
W: J.C. Chandor
Genre: Money
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: The person who works Wall Street and yet has a conscience; in other words, nobody.
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: “Why can’t he just talk sports, like normal guys?”
