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Posted By Admin on October 22, 2011

The sharp, star-studded chronicle of the crash is among the best movies of the year

Before the Door Pictures

Theres a difference between an old-fashioned financial panic and what happened on Wall Street in 2008, wrote Michael Lewis in his excellent
chronicle of the crash, The Big Short. In an old-fashioned panic, perception creates its own reality: Someone shouts Fire! in a crowded
theater and the audience crushes each other to death in its race for the exits. On Wall Street in 2008 the reality finally overwhelmed perceptions: A
crowded theater burned down with a lot of people still in their seatshellip;. The problem wasnt that Lehman Brothers had been allowed to fail. The
problem was that Lehman Brothers had been allowed to succeed.

The cast is uniformly and uncommonly good, even by their generally lofty standards

Though the 2008 financial crisis engendered quite a few good books and documentaries, it hasnt inspired much in the way of narrative
film. This is no great surprise: The cinematic opportunities inherent in credit default swaps rather pale in comparison to those of predator drones,
let alone extraterrestrial cops or robots. With his Wall Street sequel last year, Oliver Stone tried to again seize the economic zeitgeist, but it eluded his grasp. The film was at once hoary
and contrived, an inflated melodrama of schemes and betrayals and motorcycle races that never conveyed the impersonal urgency of its subtitle: Money Never Sleeps.

Among the many virtues of Margin Call, the engrossing debut feature by writer-director JC Chandor, is its appreciation of this economic
implacability. Unlike the second Wall Street (or, for that matter, the first), the movie understands that financial markets arent merely
tools to be wielded for purposes nefarious or benign, but vast and evolving entities in their own right, often inscrutable even to their purported
custodians. Chandors film is not a tale of the plots and counterplots of conniving bankers. It is a disaster movie, in which even the Masters of the
Universe are running for their lives.

The movie depicts two daysand the long, intervening nightat a large investment firm loosely based on Lehman Brothers. The financial bubble is already
popping, but no one has yet heard the sound it makes, with the exception of veteran risk analyst Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci). Before he can warn his
colleagues, however, Dale is offhandedly cashiered, in what is clearly not the firms first round of layoffs. (As he tells the duo of Ryan-Bingham-like downsizers assigned to ease his transition: Look, I run risk management.
I dont see how thats a natural place to start cutting jobs.) On his way out of the building, Dale tosses a USB drive containing his unfinished
research to a young protege, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), who has escaped the corporate axe.

That night, as his fellow survivors head out to toast their good fortune, Sullivan stays behind to complete the analysis Dale had begun. It is, as he soon
recognizes, a harbinger of financial apocalypse. Sullivan summons his boss (Paul Bettany), who summons his boss (Kevin Spacey), who summons his boss
(Simon Baker), each fish bigger than the last, all the way up to the biggest fish in the pond: a primeval creature named Tuld, who arrives by
helicopter and is played by Jeremy Irons.

As we work our way up this food chain, one character after another seems set up as narrative foil or villain-in-waiting: Bettanys tough, crew-cutted
Brit, grinding Nicorette lozenges between his teeth as if they were competitors; Spaceys mid-level exec, pining for a sick dog while inured to the
human toll around him; Ironss sardonic, sepulchral CEO. Yet with a minor exception or two, there are no white hats or black hats to be found here,
merely modern-day shades of gray flannel. Chandors film is less a portrait
of individual malfeasance than of systemic, cultural failure. His characters have made their moral compromises gradually, selling off bits of
themselves at a loss, piece by piece, until they find that their debts outweigh their assets and the only evident way out is to keep going.

Categories: Financial
Tags: Financial