Released just in time for the growing Occupy Wall Street movement, first-time writer-director J. C. Chandor’s Margin Call attempts to explore incidents leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.
While Oliver Stone’s Wall Street sequel and HBO’s Too Big to Fail are also portrayals of the historic turn of events in 2008, Chandor’s story is told from the perspective of employees at an investment bank whose actions essentially trigger the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns.
The film starts off with a strong, dramatic opening scene, in which 70 percent of a trading desk at an investment bank is laid off. Risk manager Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) is callously let go after 19 years of loyalty to the firm. As he’s walking out of the building, he hands a USB key to his associate, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto). Eric asks Peter to look into the files and warns him to “be careful.”
That evening, after digging into the risk analysis that Eric had started, Peter discovers that the firm is over-leveraged and could potentially stand to lose more than its market cap value if things were to move in the wrong direction.
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He then spends the next few hours conveying this message to the upper levels of management at his firm. (This is where the film loses its edge and becomes a bit repetitive as the same message is delivered over and over in vague and oversimplified terms.) Ultimately, the CEO of the firm makes a critical decision that will end up impacting the lives of millions of Americans, including the few remaining in his employ.
Chandor, whose father was a longtime Merrill Lynch employee, wrote the film to tell the financial crisis story from the lens of innocent banking employees who are merely doing their jobs and unaware of the sinister practices masterminded by senior management at these companies.
Chandor effectively translates the world of Wall Street onto the big screen and is successful in creating a matrix of characters, some that you may empathize with and others that are innately power-hungry and greedy. However, through it all, Chandor is careful not to judge. He’s simply delivering a 24-hour snapshot of supposedly real events that occurred leading up to one of the worst recessions in history.
While the plot is somewhat oversimplified, Margin Call is very rich in Hollywood royalty. Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, and Paul Bettany all deliver excellent performances and keep the audience on its toes.
All in all, Margin Call is an entertaining directorial debut from Chandor.
[etRating value=“ 3”]
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