Margin Call

J.C. Chandor's debut feature film pulls back the curtain on capitalism's most powerful players.  Few of us will ever meet people like this, and even fewer will fully comprehend the nature of their work, but their actions have a profound effect on all of us.  The film seeks to explain, on the individual rather than the corporate level, what happened at companies like Lehman Brothers to initiate the economic collapse of 2008.  Although the full scope of the damage these financiers wrought is probably too complex to convey through cinema, and while it's debatable whether such a knotty issue is best explained in a fictional drama like Margin Call or a documentary like Craig Ferguson’s 2010 film Inside Job, I am grateful for films like this one, which provide insight and food for thought.  

Margin Call humanizes the responsible parties and shows us events from their perspectives. The men in this movie, and they almost all men, share a common motivation, but there is as much variation in their styles, abilities, and ethics as in any other group.  The characters are convincing and real, rather than caricatures or straw men, but Chandor doesn't let them off the hook for the mess in which the Western world is still enmired.  The script is tight and claustrophobic; the film takes place in about 36 hours, mostly in one building, and it captures the tense but liberating feeling of staying up to work all night.  The cast is first rate, and even Kevin Spacey, who was the one weak link in the great film version of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, redeems himself here.  I look forward to more films by this writer/director.