{"id":14013,"date":"2012-01-13T22:54:05","date_gmt":"2012-01-13T22:54:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/?p=14013"},"modified":"2013-10-20T21:46:38","modified_gmt":"2013-10-20T20:46:38","slug":"margin-call-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/2012\/01\/13\/margin-call-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Margin Call"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

J.C Chandor’s portrait of a modern Wall Street bank is a slow-burn acting master class.<\/p>\n

With a narrative loosely modelled on the extraordinary events of September 2008, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers<\/a> gored a huge hole in the global economy<\/a>, it paints a bleak but compelling portrait of financial meltdown.<\/p>\n

After a risk analyst (Stanley Tucci) at a large Wall Street bank is fired, his underling (Zachary Quinto) soon realises the entire company could go under within 36 hours.<\/p>\n

We then see various managers struggle with the crisis: a salesman (Paul Bettany), the head of sales (Kevin Spacey), the head of securities (Simon Baker), the head of risk (Demi Moore) and finally the CEO (Jeremy Irons).<\/p>\n

What is so impressive about the film is that it takes us right inside the den of greed and manages to convey the enormity of the crisis through acting and atmosphere.<\/p>\n

It doesn’t ask us to sympathise with the various employees, but instead depicts a haunting, dread-filled portrait of a society crumbling from the top down.<\/p>\n

In the quiet specifics of a bank, amidst humming computer screens and late night boardrooms, Chandor finds a wider cultural malaise.<\/p>\n

That this is his debut film is remarkable – he not only shows a shrewd grasp of the Wall Street culture but shows a sure sense of atmosphere and tension.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Shot in just 17 days for around $3m and mostly set inside a single building, he has cannily used the limited time and resources to his advantage.<\/p>\n

His screenplay thrives on disbelief and confusion – characters frequently express the desire to hear things in plain English – which mirrors society’s wider shock that Wall Street could be getting away with this for so long.<\/p>\n

The wider point seems to be that successive governments and voters were only too happy because they too were part of the problem, happy to buy into what was essentially a giant Ponzi scheme.<\/p>\n

What is brilliant about the narrative is that it continually takes us up the corporate ladder and depicts with startling eloquence how everyone is essentially powerless to stop what’s coming.<\/p>\n

It was presumably this underlying intelligence that attracted actors like Tucci, Spacey and Irons, all of who give some of their best performances in years.<\/p>\n

There are also small but perfectly formed turns from the likes of Quinto, Bettany, Baker and Moore who neatly round off one of the best ensemble casts of the year.<\/p>\n

As any decent dramatist knows, silence can be as crucial as dialogue – in some cases the faces here depict more than words ever could – but where the film gets really fascinating is the exchanges towards the end as the higher ups debate the final course of action for their firms.<\/p>\n

They may or may not be the kind of words that Richard Fuld<\/a> used in the weeks after Lehman Brothers died but they give a plausible insight into the pathological nature of the state-subsidised capitalism of the past few years.<\/p>\n

When Margin Call was premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 25th it coincided with an organised day of protest in Egypt<\/a>, which formed a key part of the Arab Spring, and its US release in October neatly coincided with the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There is a certain irony that Arab nations have influenced American protest, given that part of the reason the US economy is in trouble is the trillion dollars squandered on invading that region of the world.<\/p>\n

But we live in strange times where there is a growing sense of despair and anger amongst a generation of people expected to suffer because of the poisonous actions of the actions of the Wall Street-Government nexus<\/a>.<\/p>\n