Margin Call
Angelika Film Centre, November 4, 2011
Movie #78 for 2011
Margin Call follows the events of one (fictionalised) 2008 night perched between a perfectly ordinary day and the catastrophic collapse of Wall street. Over the course of the film, and the night, more and more senior staff are called from their beds into the office as the importance of the impending collapse sinks in. The film stays very much inside the glass and steel-towered world of trading and is almost entirely unconcerned with “normal people”. It's wall to wall men in suits. But not in the way I'd expected.
The cast are impeccable - from ZACHARY QUINTO (Star Trek) and PENN BADGLEY (“Gossip Girl”) as the junior risk analysts who know what the numbers mean; STANLEY TUCCI (Captain America) as their fired boss and the office’s albatross; PAUL BETTANY (Priest) as his brass-balls boss; long-serving KEVIN SPACEY (LA Confidential, pictured, left, with Quinto and Badgley) as his; young hot-shot SIMON BAKER (also LA Confidential) as his boss; DEMI MOORE (Mr Brooks) as his colleague; and JEREMY IRONS (The Lion King) as the boss of everyone and everything.
I admire the cunning of writer-director J. C. CHANDOR. It feels like he made no judgment about his characters and their choices - he is very sympathetic and painstakingly details how choices like these get made - leaving me room to make up my own mind. But there can really only be one conclusion, the exact conclusion Chandor had in mind. To varying degrees, the characters knowingly screw over each other, their industry colleagues and “normal people”. They do so either with or without reservations - but I honestly don’t know which one is worse.
