This hype surrounding Margin Call centers around the topical economic and financial relevance of our day. Living in the aftermath of one of the greatest financial calamities this country has faced, Americans are still swimming in the turbulent waters of a national unemployment number hovering around nine percent and a still very unresolved housing crisis. The representatives of our deeply divided partisan government are mainly concerned with implementing their respective ideologies regardless of circumstance, instead of coming together in a solution-oriented manner to face this economic crisis.
Margin Call follows in the footsteps of movies like Wall Street, Boiler Room and Rogue Trader. Rogue Trader, starring Ewan McGregor, shares some similarity to Margin Call in the sense both films cover financial disasters based upon actual events. Barings Bank, a major financial company, was undone and bankrupted by one lone trader, Nick Lesson. This situation portrayed in Rogue Trader is more of an example of corporate malfeasance as a singularity instead of an industry wide phenomenon.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0131566/
Based on the marketing surrounding this film, there was an expectation of something in the vein of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, with a few larger-than-life Gordon Gekko-like characters eating up the screen. Instead, the audience receives a different kind of film.
Margin Call is a study into the beliefs of the high-level players of a major financial house, and how these beliefs influence their choices and perspectives. The characters in the film vary in age and experience. Because of this diversity, the audience learns how the ultimate ideologies held by people in this industry are formed, and how they can affect behavior over time.
Each character has their own unique viewpoint, but at the end of the day, they all choose to survive regardless of the emotional cost to themselves, their clients and more importantly the economic well being of the world. They are riddled with concerns about retirement, health care and the overwhelming crushing weight of debt.
Despite having lavish salaries and reaching the heights of the financial world, the characters of Margin Call suffer from the same ills that normal, everyday Americans combat daily. The screeching sound of financial anxiety coupled with a narcissistic corporate culture results in the belief system at play in this film.
At some point, you may find yourself feeling sorry for these characters. Before immediately rejecting these feelings, remember that human beings can and will make bad decisions, even ones that get paid globs of money not to make poor choices. Margin Call explores the human condition of those people working at the highest levels of business.
According to the makers of this film, at the center of this journey are not the larger-than-life Gordon Gekko and Donald Trump personalities we might expect, but fragile, fearful, people singularly focused on their own simple aims. While possessing wonderful intellectual capacities to assimilate complex data and analyze highly nuanced financial information, the financial executives of Margin Call do not have the ability to break out of their own conditioning to make better choices.
If you’re watching Margin Call in the hope of finding a detailed explanation of what exactly took down the market, get ready for disappointment. To learn more about the financial collapse, you will be better off watching a documentary like Inside Job.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1645089/
Margin Call does an adequate job of explaining the technical financial happenings, but consciously avoids going into great depth. For example, the characters throw around a few industry related acronyms without explaining what they mean. This reflects a definite choice by the director and screenwriter, J.C. Chandor. It’s very difficult to distill this type of financial complexity in a two hour film without boring the audience to death.
Despite the assortment of very gifted actors in the film, not one outstanding performance comes to mind. The two best performances are given by Zachary Quinto & Jeremy Irons. Quinto did a wonderful job in the most recent incarnation of Star Trek. I love what J.J. Abrahams is doing with the Start Trek franchise, and Quinto’s imaginative rendition of the youthful and emotional Spock demands recognition.
In Margin Call he plays a “sort of” rocket scientist turned risk analyst. Quinto can definitely play the really smart, high- IQ scientist without difficulty. The real question is can he handle the myriad of other types of roles out there with the same kind of ease he has exhibited in Star Trek and Margin Call? As far as I’m concerned, Quinto is without question cinematic, and he will end up lighting up movie screens for years to come.
Jeremy Irons proves once again that he can act. He effortlessly plays the shrewd, out-of-touch elitist. I somewhat recently watched Damage, a film from 1992 where Irons plays a similar kind of character, except instead of destroying the economy, the character’s inability to control his sexual feelings results in the destruction of his family. This super-sexual film also stars Juliette Binoche at the height of her sultriness. The climactic moment at the end of Damage makes the film worthwhile.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104237/
Because the majority of the scenes in Margin Call are shoot in and around an office building, there seems to be more of a stage play feel to the film. Despite this playhouse aspect of the movie, Margin Call has a very re-watchable quality. Without a doubt, some cable television station will end up replaying this movie over-and-over again for this very reason.
As people across the world protest corporate decadence and the gross inequalities of wealth, Margin Call attempts to shed some light upon the belief systems held by the movers and shakers of our financial institutions which has fecklessly lead to our worsening global economic predicament.
