Margin Call

dir: J.C. Chandor

This is a non-stop rollercoaster ride of Armageddon-like thrills and fucking spills. If you’ve seen Children of Men, the incredible action / dystopian sci fi flick about a planet where no children are being born, then imagine that level of cinematic amazement, only set in an office populated entirely by shmucks working in the finance industry.

Yes, the finance industry, or the financial sector, if you want to be pedantic, and who, splayed seductively across the tubes of the internets, doesn’t? It’s the place where the best, brightest and most amazing people in society work with the largest sums of money that anyone outside of the accountant for an oil-rich country’s brutal dictator gets to play with.

Margin Call is not about a specific firm (cough Lehman Brothers cough) or a specific time (hello Global Financial Crisis circa 2008), but it does seem to be trying to represent a certain kind of muted catastrophe that some of us might remember, seeing as its effects are still reverberating, and, if you believe certain doomsayers, hasn’t even peaked yet.

It follows a day in the lives of a bunch of traders, analysts and executives at The Firm, which, from the view from the building’s top floors, is the crème de la crème of Wall Street. Though we’re meant to assume that they are a money factory, they’re still shedding workers at film’s beginning, either because they’re not dead inside yet, or because they’re not unethical enough.

One of the people who is let go to start on the next phase of his life, in the euphemistic vernacular of the time (this scene comes straight out of the firing scenes in Up In the Air), is played by Stanley Tucci, an actor universally beloved by all, and those that don’t can go fuck themselves. They fire him in an almost vindictive manner, as if not only to protect The Firm, but to render the person fired a non-person by locking them out of everything they could use to communicate their displeasure to anyone. They shut off his mobile before he’s even left the building.

Ordinarily, no-one would care. I wouldn’t care. People only care when it happens to them. Their families care. But the other worker’s around them left behind are just glad that the executioner’s blade didn’t find their neck. Phew. But The Tooch palms off a flash drive to one of the analysts called Peter (Zachary Quinto), telling him that there’s something on the drive he should check out.

Naturally, Peter does. And because he’s ever so smart, he plugs some numbers and formulas into the construct he finds that says the company is about to be destroyed.

Actually, that’s not what he finds out. What he finds out is that the catastrophe isn’t about to happen, or that it’ll happen on some fateful day down the track. He finds out that the Apocalypse has already happened.

Now that’s a twist, yeah? When the end comes, the phrase goes that it could happen with a whimper instead of a bang, but what about an end to all things of such complexity and hubris that people didn’t even know how long they’d been dead for.

It’s like The Rapture happened and nobody noticed.

The rest of the film transpires through people talking, talking, talking. What else could they do? The Global Financial Crisis, the collapse of Enron or any of the market crashes, didn’t happen as a result of some exploding bomb or someone going crazy with a pair of pliers. People were probably looking at a screen, and saw some number change from something to something else, and then a chart they generated had a plunging arrow, and that was that.

We get to watch, in almost excruciating detail, what one of these large firms would do, did do, will do, and why. I can’t know whether this is true or accurate in any objective sense as a depiction of what went down at Lehman Brothers or Goldman Sachs, or whether this is a verbatim rendering of anything. For me, it felt like it was spot on. For a feature film not pretending to be a documentary, it’s important that it at least gets across how it must have felt for some of the participants, and this really gets the tone of that right.

It’s not, in any way, an indictment of contemporary capitalism, or Wall Street beyond looking critically at practices that are certainly unethical, though not necessarily illegal, whatever the Securities and Exchange Commission might say. The characters, who we don’t really know as characters, but more as types, get these issues across more by their ages and their relative positions in the company, rather than what they do.

Peter himself is young and brilliant, and previously studied as an engineer, hence the mathematical speciality. He himself admits that his decision to leave that field and work for Wall Street came down to a basic mathematical calculation: the difference between the money he can make on Wall Street minus the money he could make in the aerospace industry. Being young, with few responsibilities, he doesn’t seem to care that much about the catastrophe he’s unleashed.

His manager (Paul Bettany, who’s in a decent film for once) is seemingly ruthless, but he’s at least clear eyed about the reality of their situation. The much maligned financial instruments known as mortgage-backed securities that play a role here, in his eyes, wouldn’t exist if not for the greed of the so-called ‘normal’ people, aspiring to stuff they clearly have no way of affording. When Wall Street’s firing on all cylinders, and the money rain is falling for everyone, there are no complaints as to their behaviour. When the party ends, then they’re the ones blamed unfairly, in his eyes, since this is the behaviour and these are the actions the system requires them to take.

Bettany’s character also admits, when asked about his salary (all the traders and analysts consistently obsess over each other’s salaries, I guess because it would be unseemly to literally whip their dicks out to measure them in the salubrious confines of the office), that he squanders a lot of it on hookers and cocaine.

The rest he just wastes.

Paul Bettany’s manager (Kevin Spacey) is no innocent in the woods. He’s worked for The Firm for over thirty years, though, and likes to think that he’s contributed to something, that he’s had a role in building something. Sure, he’s in it for the money as well, but he has no interest in destroying something he’s built up, just to get some extra scratch, or just to cover his own arse.

It’s a theme reinforced via conversation (the whole goddamn flick is conversation, honest to gods, it’s like one long unending play!) with the Stanley Tucci character, who relates at nauseating length what he used to do before Wall Street, being engineering as well, and he relates in excruciating mathematical detail how much time a bridge he built has saved for countless people. The continued theme is that many of these people working and toiling over this complete abstraction (being money) did or could have continued making worthwhile and tangible, helpful things in the real world instead of what they stuck with because the pay was so good. It’s up to us to assume that it’s a crying shame.

Spacey’s character Sam is also in the process of grieving for his dying dog, which is the only family he has left. We can presume that his all-consuming dedication to The Firm earned him a lot of money, but that this didn’t exactly endear him to his family. All this humanises him, probably a bit more than any of the other characters, which is to Sam’s and the film’s benefit.

When the senior executives come calling to The Firm’s offices via helicopter at 4 in the morning, it’s got the frisson of “oh fuck, Mum and Dad have come back early, and we haven’t had time to clean up the damage and the bodies from the meth party.” Jeremy Irons, as some Monty Burns type, for once, doesn’t chew or fuck the scenery. He does, calmly, make the case that the awful, awful actions The Firm are about to take, to guarantee their own bonuses when The Firm goes under, is a perfectly natural thing to do in the face of utter annihilation. And anyway, these corrections are natural parts of the cycle, and everyone still around afterwards will get over it.

There really isn’t an alternative course of action set out, but Sam, who carries our the final Nuremberg-like order, rails against what they’re about to do, because he cares what might happen to the entire global system of finance not if they fail, but if they succeed. The other senior partners in the firm? Not so much.

This is a really well put together, well-acted flick, but I can’t see that many people would find it that interesting. The subject is so dry, and the script is subtle enough that I can imagine whole swathes of people being so bored by the film that they throw themselves from the top floor of countless Wall Street skyscrapers. The realistic manner in which it’s all laid out, and the believable way in which these characters interact doesn’t do the flick any favours in the dramatic stakes.

It was still interesting to me. These are the titans, the captains of industry, the best and the brightest whose decisions impact upon the course of our lives, indifferent in their Olympian distance from us as to the wreckage they leave in their wake.

We really should be a bit more afraid.

7 times I’m glad I’m not that smart sometimes out of 10

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“Fuck normal people. You know, the funny thing is, tomorrow if all of this goes tits up they're gonna crucify us for being too reckless but if we're wrong, and everything gets back on track? Well then, the same people are gonna laugh till they piss their pants cause we're gonna all look like the biggest pussies God ever let through the door.” – compassionate man – Margin Call