Close Search Close

Categories

 

  • Comics
  • Theatre
  • Site News

 

Support Us

Film

Streaming Shuffle

Margin Call

by Lauren James on January 8, 2025

Sorting out dramatic motivations, limitations, and priorities on the eve of the 2008 financial crash.

J. C. Chandor’s Margin Call is a coolly riveting look at crafting drama out of a foregone conclusion.

The film is set in a Wall Street investment bank in 2008, and the dance band is playing on the deck on the Titanic. This is, as one character puts it, the moment when they realize the music is about to stop—and they have only a few hours to decide if they’re going to do the right thing or the selfish one. It’s Wall Street, so we already know. And we already know what the financial crisis will mean for countless ordinary people, and you could easily ask why we should care what it means for the exorbitantly wealthy (and therefore much less vulnerable) men and women who caused it.

Chandor knows that the only good answer here is, “Because I can make it interesting.”

He’s right to be confident. There are touches of grim satire here, but most of all, Margin Call excels as a problem-solving thriller, generating stakes and urgency even though the problem it’s solving is, “How can we fuck over others before we ourselves are fucked?”

When you can offer audiences process and decisiveness, you don’t really need likability—but you do need moral texture and dramatically distinct characters. And that, for me, is where Margin Call really shines.

Its efforts are aided by an absurdly stacked cast: Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, Penn Badgley, Simon Baker, Mary McDonnell, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci, and Aasif Mandvi. You know a lot before people even open their mouths: of course Simon Baker is playing the aggressive wunderkind executive everyone loathes.

Slowly, steadily, the film works out and reveals its major characters’ priorities. SPOILERS will follow, because this is all too good not to talk about:

Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), who oversees the traders, has the accoutrements (a dying dog, an ex-wife) of a weary, bruised, beaten-down man, and it gives him a kind of cheap soulfulness—enough, at least, for his own bosses to wonder if he’ll toe the line. But he can’t live up to his own losses, and we see the exact moment he realizes that he’s always been a company man and that it’s too late to be anything else. (It’s when Quinto’s character asks him if he’s warned his son about the impending crash, and we—and Sam—can see it never even occurred to him.)

Penn Badgley’s Seth, a rookie banker along for the night’s wild ride only by association, starts off nonchalantly comfortable in his own skin, funny and casual, open about his greed and aware of the ridiculousness of his profession. But he can’t be a true realist: in the end, he’s just young, and cynicism is no substitute for actual calluses.

Badgley’s best scene is with Simon Baker’s cutthroat Jared Cohen, whose confidence—and willingness to cast his allies aside—has let him rocket up the ranks. Jared doesn’t get an arc but a moment, and a damn good one: he’s mid-shave when a teary Seth (who knows his pink slip is on the way) blurts out that this is all he’s ever wanted to do. For a second, as sharklike as Jared is, he pauses. “Really?” he says. (Baker nails the delivery: he’s too distant from his emotions now to care that this is sad, but he still thinks it is.)

His opposite number is Demi Moore’s Sarah Robertson, who—alas for her—can only bring herself to be truly brutal with people she hates, and who—alas again—is a woman, and therefore implicitly marked by the industry as disposable and first in line for scapegoating. Her biggest moment comes from knowing that and simply exhaling, getting closure from the other shoe finally dropping.

Paul Bettany’s Will Emerson gets two dramatic flashpoints, the second bitterly recontextualizing the first. Will is a chatty, laid-back people person—like a lot of the bank’s higher-ups, he knows more about sales than anything else—and well-liked both up and down the ladder. And there’s a reason for that: in a ruthless business, Will offers genuine compassion and loyalty. He’s offered the chance to neatly usurp Sam—the higher-ups want a back-up in case Sam’s burgeoning conscience gets in the way—and he turns it down with what seems like real disgust … only to get a later “ordinary fucking people” speech that tells us his sense of decency is confined to his peers. He’s a brother-in-arms, not a citizen.

His perspective is informed by sheer longevity, which makes it, in some ways, the purest perspective of all; he’s a human xenomorph uncomplicated by honor, pity, or shame.

One of the film’s only real missteps is using John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) in more than two scenes, because those two are all we need to know everything about him, and his screen-grabbing presence depreciates outside of them. But it’s hard to beat his initial conference room appearance, where he’s flown in by helicopter to know absolutely nothing—“It wasn’t brains that got me here, I can assure you that”—except how to survive. His perspective is informed by sheer longevity, which makes it, in some ways, the purest perspective of all; he’s a human xenomorph uncomplicated by honor, pity, or shame. When Sam, enunciating precisely, tries to tell him that dumping all their bad assets on the market will not only trigger the inevitable crash but ruin all their business relationships forevermore—“You will never sell anything to any of those people ever again”—Tuld simply says, “I understand.” He does. He just doesn’t care, because in a sociopath’s long game, it doesn’t matter. Many of those people will soon be out of a job, anyway. He’ll sell to others: after all, there’s a sucker born every minute.

Some of the finest character work, on the other hand, is given to Stanley Tucci’s Eric Dale. Eric is the first to see the crash coming—when he’s unceremoniously fired in the middle of compiling the data, he passes his research off to Zachary Quinto’s Peter Sullivan (whom we’ll discuss in a moment), who finishes the work and reveals the imminent disaster. Eric’s work is central, but he spends most of the movie AWOL—the bank shut off his company cell phone the second he stepped out of the door, and now, gratifyingly, this cruel bit of disregard is biting them in the ass—a vanished prophet. When Will Emerson finally turns him up—and of course it’s Will who gets the good tip, who is the one Eric’s wife will talk to—Eric has had time to grow rueful.

“Do you know I built a bridge once? … I was an engineer by trade. It went from Dilles Bottom, Ohio to Moundsville, West Virginia. It spanned nine hundred and twelve feet above the Ohio River. Twelve thousand people used this thing a day. And it cut out thirty-five miles of driving each way between Wheeling and New Martinsville.”

He has all the statistics—has probably spent part of the night committing them to memory. He knows, to the mile and the minute, how much driving and time his one bridge has saved.

It’s easy, in the moment, to interpret this speech as a bittersweet one. Once, he did something that mattered, but that was twenty-two years ago. What the hell has he done since? That’s certainly how Will interprets it, and it’s why he tries to reassure him: “Hey, Eric? Don’t beat yourself too much about this stuff, all right? Some people like taking the long way home. Who the fuck knows?”

Eric says that even though the bank wants to bring him back for the day—to keep him sequestered while it purges its books of all subprime mortgages, to make sure he doesn’t talk—he won’t go. He’s over it, no matter what they’re offering: “I’ve been paid enough.”

But the beauty of Tucci’s performance is that when he does come back—in a separate scene, without any fanfare—we feel that even he knew this was inevitable, and he’s neither surprised nor bothered by it. The film doesn’t invite us to feel contempt for him caving. He was brought back by the same kind of recital of numbers he trotted out about the bridge: here’s how much he’ll make an hour if he sits in this room today, and hey, he has a mortgage to pay. His initial resistance probably drove their offer up, and it gave him some satisfaction, and that’s all that matters.

And just as Will’s contempt for the masses recontextualizes his kindness to his colleagues, Eric’s final reappearance recontextualizes his bridge story. It wasn’t wistfulness, it was clarity. At one point Sam—responding to a “get over yourself” comment about how, hey, he could’ve been a ditch-digger all these years—retorts that if he had, at least there’d be a few ditches he could point to, something to show for his life’s work. Eric, we understand, has something to show. He built that bridge. And maybe that’s enough for a lifetime.*

Finally, there’s Peter Sullivan (Quinto), who trained as a literal rocket scientist but ended up here because, as he admits: “It’s all just numbers, really. … And, to speak freely, the money here is considerably more attractive.” He’s ostensibly the likable audience surrogate character, kicking off the plot but not having to get his hands dirty by resolving it. He’s smart. He’s loyal. He bothers to make meaningful gestures and reach out to people who are hurting. In a nicely human detail, he’s nervous around movers and shakers he doesn’t know.

And he’s exactly the same at the end of the film as he is at the beginning, and it’s only in retrospect that we understand that while this was a long, tough night for him, it was never a dark night of the soul. There is something unmovable in him, something that lets him go through all this unchanged. He sees his much-admired boss fired and disrespected by their employer, he knows his discovery helped said employer set a mini-apocalypse into motion … and he can still shake John Tuld’s hand and accept his promotion. There’s a vacuum where his resignation would be in a more by-the-numbers movie, and it only makes the film more compelling in retrospect. No one escapes complicity, and the most superficially “heroic” character never even tries. If you look for who he might become, in the years ahead, we have a lot of options. Either way, I’m sure he’s still around.

Margin Call is streaming on Prime and Tubi.

* I could see Chandor himself ultimately feeling that way about Margin Call and All Is Lost. “Sure, might as well make Kraven the Hunter now. Bring in the truckload of money. The bridge will still be there.”

Want to support more great writing like this? Get exclusive member benefits like access to our Discord, early access to Media Magpies content, and more by joining our Patreon!

Categories

 

  • Comics
  • Theatre
  • Site News

 

Support Us

© 2024 - — Media Magpies. All rights reserved. | RSS