Review: Margin Call

A look inside a Wall Street investment firm (barely fictionalised) just prior to what we now know as the Global Financial Crisis. Employees are getting sacked left, right, and centre (about 80% of the film!), including senior risk management guy Stanley Tucci. On his way out, Tucci hands over a USB drive to young trader (and Tucci’s protégé) Zachary Quinto, and tells him to ‘be careful’. It’s something Tucci had been in the middle of prior to getting the arse, and after taking a look at it, Quinto (whose college education means he could’ve been a rocket scientist but likes money too much) and his even younger colleague Penn Badgley are worried enough to call his immediate (and newly appointed) boss Paul Bettany back from an after work party (a ‘yay, we didn’t get fired!’ party, it would seem) to get him to look at it too. Before long, the floor manager (Kevin Spacey, solid as always as a man with a conscience in a job that demands he ignores it) is called back to work to take a look at it as well, and eventually an emergency all-nighter is called, including CEO Jeremy Irons, and his underling executives Demi Moore and Simon Baker (the latter is an absolute snake). They have some very tough decisions to make about the company’s future. Why? Because it would appear that the company’s questionable business practices have resulted in it being a tiny bit broke, and its assets useless. Meanwhile, no one seems to be able to find the disgruntled Tucci. Well, the company did disconnect his mobile phone, so I wouldn’t really want to be taking calls from those bastards, either, even if the phone was working. Mary McDonnell appears briefly in a wholly inappropriate sheer negligee as Spacey’s ex. There are no heroes in this film, just people with varying degrees of integrity and morality. The insular concerns these characters have are if not surprising, certainly horrifying. None of them seem to give a crap about anyone outside of the company, and given what eventually happened globally and economically...like I said, horrifying.

 

Writer-director J.C. Chandor does something remarkable in his debut film from 2011. There was barely a moment of detailed, jargon-heavy dialogue in this film that I wholly comprehended, and yet, I was still somehow able to go along with it and follow the gist of it. When you’re making a film about a Wall Street investment firm about to crash and burn, casting Jeremy Irons as the CEO tells you a lot. If you’ve seen “Boiler Room”, that helps too, as the film reminded me a bit of the latter stages of that film, although there’s nothing illegal per se going on here, just amoral (dare I use the term ‘morally bankrupt’?). And of course, if you’ve followed the headlines of the last 5-10 years, even if you are as shite at maths as I am, you can certainly follow this film’s trajectory, no matter how incoherent the numbers talk seems to be.

 

There isn’t a dud performance to be found (though Badgley, like his character, seems kinda expendable), but the three standouts are definitely Paul Bettany (as an affable but completely nonchalant yuppie), Stanley Tucci (as the recently sacked worker who started the investigation before passing the data onto Quinto), and best of all a completely soulless Jeremy Irons, pitch-perfect casting. His callousness, ego, and selfishness are truly frightening. Tucci, for his part, steals his every scene (it’s rare that he isn’t a scene-stealer), which is sadly too few, because his is one of the more sympathetic characters in a film full of devils, amoral snakes, sycophantic ‘yes’ men, hardened bitches, and ambitious youngsters. I wasn’t as impressed with Kevin Spacey as others seem to have been, but that may just be because I’ve seen Spacey do incredible work in so many other films. His subtle facial expressions here, however, say a helluva lot.

 

I can’t wait to see what Chandor comes out with next, after this impressive debut, which earned him a Best Original Screenplay nomination at the Oscars. I was particularly impressed with how he took potentially dry, dull, and dense material, and managed to make it interesting and at times even thrilling. The pacing, in particular is really impressive for a film that’s all talk.

 

It’s a solid and interesting film, even though the jargon is somewhat indecipherable, and the ending didn’t sit right with me. Or at least, I’d prefer it to have ended on a scene with someone else, the person it ends on is perhaps one of the more sympathetic characters, but still too morally compromised for the emotion the filmmaker is seeking from the audience. But then, I can’t figure out which character I’d prefer it to end with (no one comes out of this cleanly except maybe Badgley or Tucci), so perhaps I’m just nitpicking, I just felt somewhat letdown at the end.

 

Certainly Americans would get more out of this than most, but it was called the global financial crisis for a reason, so I don’t think its appeal is all that limited.

 

Rating: B-