Delayed Reaction: Margin Call

The Pitch: A Wall Street firm tries to figure out what it should do when it has an early warning of the 2008 financial crisis.

I make it no secret that I find the "evil businessman" trope to be about the dullest thing in movies. All sorts of movies are interested in finding human shades to murderers, rapists, and all sorts of unsavory characters, but businessmen [or bankers] are normally one-dimensional and boring villains. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying we need to shed a tear for the misrepresentation of the affluent businessman. I'm saying that a screenwriter shouldn't expect praise for going after an easy target (In other news: Nazis are bad). Even when a movie tries to examine Wall Street types a little closer, like The Big Short, it's in a "aren't these people the worst?" way, which again, gets repetitive.

That's what makes Margin Call such a refreshing change of pace. When it first came out in 2011, I heard "wall street" and "2008 financial crisis" and decided to skip it, assuming it was another lazy indictment on Wall Street power brokers, written by people who barely understand what was even going on*. When a friend who actually knows that kind of stuff said the movie was pretty good, I decided to give it a try and I'm glad I did.

*For the record, I barely understand what happened in 2008 either. It's complex stuff.

Margin Call is a movie about people trying to figure out what to do in an emergency. It's morality vs. survival. No one is a hero or villain. They are all people. I won't pretend that they are all lovable. They are hard drinking, greedy Machiavellians. Simon Baker is especially sleazy as one of the upper-level managers. Stanley Tucci is like any middle-management middle-aged man. Kevin Spacey is the closest thing to a moral center of the movie and even he's a survivalist. Jeremy Irons as the company's CEO is pragmatic and presents himself as likable enough, but it's easy to see how he can become a sonuvabitch when needed. In other words, the movie is filled with characters, not types.

As much as I liked the performances, the Oscar nominated screenplay is what shines. It's tense. It's tight. It's funny. The story escalates in a natural way. It does a great job both showing how and why these people got to the level of power they're at while not letting them off the hook for the mistakes they made that put them in this position. Some of them are cockroaches. Some are sacrificial lambs. All of them knew that going in. This is a smart script. Not in the way The Big Short is smart, in which it pats itself on the back for doing such a job explaining itself. Margin Call has a lot of really complex stuff that the audience needs to know in order to understand the stakes but it doesn't want to lecture about it. It's more important to understand the stakes than what caused the stakes. Most of the night scenes are handled like a low-boil horror movie, where this disaster is looming and the only decision left is whether to mitigate the damage by spreading it out or take the entire hit.

I liked this movie a lot.

Verdict (?): Strongly Recommend