"Margin Call"

Making films about the financial world presents the especially tricky challenge of investing viewers into a world where rich men in expensive suits engage with money as an immaterial, almost non-existent entity, in a difficultly decipherable financial jargon whose purpose appears to be the translation of nothingness into wide-ranging real-world results. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street circumvented the problem by using this world of abstractions as a stage for a fairly routine Greek tragedy. Martin Scorsese’s more successful Wolf Of Wall Street took a more outrageous route, using his unparalleled musicality to connect the toxic masculine impulse for instant sexual gratification to the entitlement culture that plagues capitalism.

J. C. Chandor’s feature-length début Margin Call takes a more sober approach altogether, retaining Wall Street’s tragic codes but applying them to a decidedly more relevant aspect of Wall Street culture; namely, the knowledge that, no matter what they do, somebody, somewhere is going to be negatively affected by their calculations and speculations. When promising young risk analyst Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) gets entrusted with sensitive data by his just-fired boss Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), the disturbing reality of what his work entails hits home in more ways than one. Caught in the impossible dilemma of saving either their already-embattled firm or the economy, he and his coworkers effectively come across as modern Greek gods, conscientiously measuring and juggling the fates of untold millions with barely any acknowledgment that they exist, all from the comfort of their steel-and-glass Olympus.

It is certainly an impressive pantheon that Chandor has assembled: Between Quinto’s wide-eyed Sullivan and his friend Seth (Penn Badgley), Paul Bettany’s pragmatic head trader Will Emerson acts as a cynical Hermes, mentoring his less experienced juniors and conveying bad news to both characters and viewers alike. Towering above them like a falsely benevolent Zeus is Jeremy Irons as CEO John Tuld, who expertly sugarcoats his self-serving greed with the bearing of a genial old uncle. Standing out as this colourful group’s voice of conscience is sales head Sam Rogers, through whom Kevin Spacey subverts the ruthless shark-toothed persona he built throughout his career playing similarly-positioned men with a weary and understated performance that blends in quietly until explicitly called upon to take the spotlight.

His performance, while not the film’s best (that honour belongs to Bettany), does a more consistent job of bringing a human face to the people behind the 2007-2008 financial crisis than most of the film does. Chandor displays a good eye for composition and colour that lends an almost dreamlike quality to the long night during which the world economy’s fate is sealed. The particular emphasis he places on the blue screens and dark shadows that permeate the firm’s offices is so efficient it almost distracts from the uneven staging and editing, the latter of which is particularly disconcerting during the many dialogue scenes. Often the shots answer each other with a drab monotony that undermines the dialogue’s electric potential, and rarely engage with the environment in any meaningful way. Half the time, it looks more like an exceptionally well-lit and well-acted (save a typically wooden Demi Moore) TV movie with occasional cinematic flourishes, the best being a montage during which soundbites of Emerson knowingly selling junk to unsuspecting buyers is played over sped-up footage of busy trading offices interspersed with exterior shots of New York City.

This disappointing lack of kinesis undermines Margin Call’s moments of human insight, best exemplified when Dale movingly contrasts idealized capitalist philanthropy with the system’s reality by wistfully recalling a bridge he helped build and the estimated thousands of years of life its users saved from being “wasted in a fucking car”. There are many such monologues and speeches scattered across the film in which each character defends their conception of capitalism and finance. Unfortunately, their written qualities only further expose the film’s visual shortcomings. Chandor, the son of an investment banker, knows how to convey the situation’s direness without dumbing anything down, but his style lacks the necessary spark to truly share his insider’s gaze with his audience. We remain, despite occasional breakthroughs, stuck on the other side of the shop’s window, watching helplessly as owners stab customers and each other in the back with varying degrees of consent.