Film review: Margin Call (15)

By Siobhan Synnot
Published on Tuesday 10 January 2012 00:00

JC CHANDOR’S smart, well-acted drama condenses the 2008 financial crash into a single night when a Lehman Brothers-type firm realises it is heading for collapse unless it can offload its bad assets onto its best customers.

Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) is the first to spot the iceberg, just before he is fired in a habitual Wall Street bloodletting designed to keep their taskforce lean and hungry. He passes his data to a young trader (Zachary Quinto) who works out that the company has over-leveraged mortgage-based securities and if the damage isn’t controlled within hours, they will lose billions. By the start of trading the following morning, the firm has to decide on whether to save themselves by sacrificing everyone else. Their best salesman (Paul Bettany) isn’t exactly taking a stand, but warns that from a business point of view this will bomb the company from a position of trust for years.

A frill-free portrait of greed and hubris, this is the movie that Oliver Stone was trying to make with Wall Street 2, except Margin Call is more authentically desperate in its venality, and suspenseful in its drama. The characters are less emphatic and more lucidly drawn too. Admittedly, it’s hard to summon up tears for self-serving brokers when we’re in the throes of economic grief, but while these men (Demi Moore’s pencil-skirted robo-executive is a rare female face) are not glamorously heroic, Margin Call also resists portraying them as moustache-twirling villains.

As the panic proceeds upwards, Kevin Spacey’s manager tries to broker a deal between loyalty to a shortsighted, dishonourable company and his personal ethics. In a drama about an apocalyptic case of cooking the books, this makes him better than most, but still a man with only half a conscience – he sheds more tears over his dying dog than the ruined lives of 80 per cent of his workforce.

Yet rather than being a homily about bull market greed, Margin Call is an analysis of stock market hubris. The father of writer-director JC Chandor used to work for American financial institution Merrill Lynch, and the grasp of detail here is distinct, even if it sometimes bogs down the movie.

There’s a lot of talking in Margin Call, and the fact that everyone in quite a large cast seems to have been furnished with a blunt big speech gets a little wearing. Oddly, the financial jargon that peppers the piece isn’t nearly as tiresome; it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand the stock market, any more than you needed to understand batting averages to follow Moneyball. In fact, one of Margin Call’s best ironies is that many of the bosses can’t do the maths either. When it’s time to break down the fiscal implications for his firm, a patrician Master of the Universe (Jeremy Irons, of course) demands layman’s terms. “Speak as you might to a child,” he instructs. “Or a golden retriever.”

Margin Call (15)

Director: JC Chandor

Running time: 107 minutes

***

On general release from Friday

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