Like most criminal activity, everything in Margin Call happens in the dead of night – one specific night, in this case.
The movie’s well-dressed investment bankers, important fat cats in their self-contained worlds, are like single-celled mitochondria in the grand scheme of the financial collapse that will follow in their wake, as we watch them trudge, bleary-eyed, toward the desperate dawn of Sept. 15, 2008.
Or so we presume. Unlike recent history-based feature films that have directly addressed the beginning of the Great Recession – Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and HBO’s Too Big to Fail – Margin Call is an almost abstract rumination on the downfall. While those two films prided themselves on exhaustive research and patinas of hyperrealism – to the point where they nearly lost themselves in insider jargon – Margin Call leaves us pretty much adrift in a financial miasma, never specifically orienting us in time and space.
There are repeated references to the generic “this firm,” and the phrase “Wall Street” is never used. This is a work of fiction, and surely, any similarity to actual people and institutions (cough Lehman Brothers cough) is purely coincidental.
What this means is that Margin Call may have a longer shelf life than its ripped-from-the-literal-headlines forbears. Predicated as they are on universal human greed and bubble-bursting overexpansion, the events of the movie could happen anywhere, in any country, at potentially any time. Set largely in one ominous, shadowy skyscraper over a 24-hour time span, this intimate chamber piece plays out like a talky Greek tragedy on the corruption of power, one that will be appreciated as a work of sophisticated drama long after its immediate relevance has waned.
It all begins with brilliant company trader Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), who is passed a flash drive from his recently laid-off boss (Stanley Tucci, brilliant as always) along with a warning to “be careful.” On the drive is the skeletal information that will lead to the global financial crisis, research Peter completes with a panicked sense of urgency. He calls his friend and fellow broker (Penn Badgley) and his cynical new boss (Paul Bettany) to the office for a late-night assessment of his findings; minutes later, they’re on the phone to the next guy up the corporate totem pole (Kevin Spacey), who then reaches out to his supervisors, until this rapidly metastasizing problem reaches the desk of CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons), who arrives via helicopter at 3 in the morning.
In what is remarkably his film debut, writer-director J.C. Chandor exhibits a wicked, hilariously accurate understanding of the intellectual hierarchy of his milieu. Each suit we meet – Simon Baker and Demi Moore are in there, too, for damage control – is more important but lesser informed than the figure below him on the company’s payroll ladder, from Peter’s underpaid rocket scientist to John’s vapid, cutthroat president. Our sense of the world outside the cloistered meeting rooms is limited to the building’s janitorial staff of inevitable minorities, the silently tragic figures who will become the recession’s real victims.
In an inversion of the noxious, shark-like businessman he’s cultivated in so many roles, Kevin Spacey is the closest we get to this movie’s Henry Fonda – its righteous moral center and the most sympathetic cog in the firm’s machine. Dealing with the imminent demise of a beloved dog on the very night of the collapse, his problems are real human problems, and they’re heartbreaking. It’s easily one of Spacey’s best performances in years, his weary countenance etched with decades of quiet resignation.
It’s him the movie leaves us with, making a symbolic gesture that suggests the financial apocalypse that consumed his night is far from over.
MARGIN CALL. Director: J.C. Chandor; Cast: Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, Penn Badgley, Simon Baker, Mary McDonnell, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci; Distributor: Lionsgate; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at Movies of Delray, Living Room Theaters at FAU, Gateway 4 in Fort Lauderdale, Sunrise 11, Intracoastal in North Miami, the Coral Gables Art Cinema and AMC Sunset Place 24 in South Miami.