Ratings
The Daily: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 83%
“Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture,” Don DeLillo once wrote. “Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.” He could’ve said the same thing about bankers, who today have shaped our present moment on a scale artists can only dream of. The movie theater is a wan distraction compared to Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park or any of the other Occupy locales around the globe; the muted, quietly ambiguous message of Wall Street films like “Margin Call” or May’s “Too Big to Fail” cannot hope to compete with the loud noise of an unemployment rate hovering just above 9 percent and an economy that remains broken for all but a few.
“Margin Call,” which unfolds over the course of a day and a half at an unnamed financial firm on the brink of 2008-era ruin, shrinks even further from the wider discourse, humanizing the participants in our modern-day financial shenanigans at the cost of having anything particularly meaningful or insightful to say about them.
The film opens with a premonition of what is about to come: massive layoffs, executed by the requisite gang of corporate assassins in pantsuits, men and women bearing business cards, pre-rehearsed speeches, and pamphlets with sailboats on them. Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) is among those fired — another ominous sign, as Dale is a 19-year veteran in the firm’s risk management department. Two of his most junior employees, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) and Seth Bregman (Penn Badgley), are spared — too cheap for the company to bother to let go. On Dale’s way out, he hands Sullivan a USB drive and a warning: “Be careful.”
Sullivan — an MIT graduate and a bona fide former rocket scientist — soon figures out (while listening, in an incongruous alternative touch, to Phosphorescent’s 2007 downer anthem “Wolves”) what Dale couldn’t: His firm is in possession of enough worthless financial products to sink the entire tenuous enterprise, should anyone actually bother to do the math.
But then, that’s the joke: “Oh, Jesus, you know I can’t read these things,” says one of Sullivan’s bosses, Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), once everyone is recalled after hours to look at the doom-bearing data. Eventually the head of the firm, John Tuld (Jeremy Irons), arrives by helicopter. As he tries to get a grip on the scale of the problem, he instructs Sullivan: “Speak as you might to a young child, or a golden retriever.”
If there is an idea here — beyond the now depressingly familiar fact that to those who have the most of it, money is as much an abstract concept or computer equation as it is something that people suffer without — it’s that people in finance are among the least curious people on the planet, even (especially?) when it comes to their own business. As Tuld says to Rogers, late in the film: “We just react.”
“Margin Call” has a big and talented ensemble cast (Demi Moore, Simon Baker and Paul Bettany are also here, playing middle managers), and writer-director J.C. Chandor gives nearly everyone their own resonant bit of sub-David Mamet repartee. Watches are checked, and then checked again. But the film ultimately expends most of its creative energy exploring the minute moral differences among executives at the firm — those who are reluctant to foist off worthless paper on an economy they’re about to take down, and those who have long since done away with anything resembling reservations about the “work” that they do. In the end, though, they are all villains, and boring ones at that.
The Daily: 3.5 of 5 Stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 83%
“Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture,” Don DeLillo once wrote. “Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.” He could’ve said the same thing about bankers, who today have shaped our present moment on a scale artists can only dream of. The movie theater is a wan distraction compared to Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park or any of the other Occupy locales around the globe; the muted, quietly ambiguous message of Wall Street films like “Margin Call” or May’s “Too Big to Fail” cannot hope to compete with the loud noise of an unemployment rate hovering just above 9 percent and an economy that remains broken for all but a few.
“Margin Call,” which unfolds over the course of a day and a half at an unnamed financial firm on the brink of 2008-era ruin, shrinks even further from the wider discourse, humanizing the participants in our modern-day financial shenanigans at the cost of having anything particularly meaningful or insightful to say about them.
The film opens with a premonition of what is about to come: massive layoffs, executed by the requisite gang of corporate assassins in pantsuits, men and women bearing business cards, pre-rehearsed speeches, and pamphlets with sailboats on them. Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) is among those fired — another ominous sign, as Dale is a 19-year veteran in the firm’s risk management department. Two of his most junior employees, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) and Seth Bregman (Penn Badgley), are spared — too cheap for the company to bother to let go. On Dale’s way out, he hands Sullivan a USB drive and a warning: “Be careful.”
Sullivan — an MIT graduate and a bona fide former rocket scientist — soon figures out (while listening, in an incongruous alternative touch, to Phosphorescent’s 2007 downer anthem “Wolves”) what Dale couldn’t: His firm is in possession of enough worthless financial products to sink the entire tenuous enterprise, should anyone actually bother to do the math.
But then, that’s the joke: “Oh, Jesus, you know I can’t read these things,” says one of Sullivan’s bosses, Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), once everyone is recalled after hours to look at the doom-bearing data. Eventually the head of the firm, John Tuld (Jeremy Irons), arrives by helicopter. As he tries to get a grip on the scale of the problem, he instructs Sullivan: “Speak as you might to a young child, or a golden retriever.”
If there is an idea here — beyond the now depressingly familiar fact that to those who have the most of it, money is as much an abstract concept or computer equation as it is something that people suffer without — it’s that people in finance are among the least curious people on the planet, even (especially?) when it comes to their own business. As Tuld says to Rogers, late in the film: “We just react.”
“Margin Call” has a big and talented ensemble cast (Demi Moore, Simon Baker and Paul Bettany are also here, playing middle managers), and writer-director J.C. Chandor gives nearly everyone their own resonant bit of sub-David Mamet repartee. Watches are checked, and then checked again. But the film ultimately expends most of its creative energy exploring the minute moral differences among executives at the firm — those who are reluctant to foist off worthless paper on an economy they’re about to take down, and those who have long since done away with anything resembling reservations about the “work” that they do. In the end, though, they are all villains, and boring ones at that.
