I have had the dubious privilege of living through three epic financial bubbles: the Reagan stock rally of the 1980s (it crashed in 1987); the DotCom boom of the 1990s (crashed in 2002); and the Sub-Prime bubble of the mid-2000s (crashed in 2008). As if we needed more proof that rich people run our country, none of these bubbles resulted in significant financial reform, despite the millions of innocent people who suffered. As one character proclaims in the recent movie The Big Short, all the American electorate did was “blame immigrants and poor people” while the fat cats mostly got off Scot-free.
Perhaps the only good thing to come out of this endless cycle of boom-and-bust is an entirely new category of movie: the so-called financial thriller. This young genre (okay, sub-genre) has its origins as far back as Alan J. Pakula’s Rollover in 1981, and perhaps even earlier (Sidney Lumet’s 1976 masterpiece Network shares many of the same themes and obsessions).
But the genre really took off in 1987 with Oliver Stone’s brilliant Wall Street. Most people still see it as the definitive financial thriller, not only because it’s a great movie but also because it so vividly defines the genre’s basic elements: a young man tempted by the lure of easy money; an evil mentor who shows him how to cheat the suckers; a “good” mentor who warns him of the dangers; a sleek urban landscape of metal and glass; and (most important) a corrupting lifestyle of drugs and sex which tempt him deeper into corruption.
In this case, the box office really doesn’t lie; Wall Street is the best overall movie in the financial thriller category. But I recently found an example I like even better, a haunting little film from 2011 that made very little money. It’s title is Margin Call, and here are ten things I love about it (spoiler alert!!!)…
The Set-Up
The move begins at an unnamed Manhattan trading house on the day after a brutal downsizing. The company has laid-off its most experienced analyst, Eric (Stanley Tucci), who suffers the indignity of cleaning out his desk under the watchful eye of a security guard. As the guard escorts Dale to the elevator, he slips a thumb drive to his young protege, Peter (Zachary Quinto) asking him to give the contents a look. So begins the action which, over the next twenty-four hours, will turn the company upside down.
The Way It Subverts the Genre
Yes, it’s a financial thriller, but I love the way first-time director J. C. Chandor cleverly contradicts almost all of the conventions that I listed above. For instance, it has none of the scenes of coke-fueled debauchery that we have come to expect from movies like The Wolf of Wall Street. And instead of the usual montages of young men barking into phones as they bilk millions on the trading floor, most of the scenes in Margin Call are quiet, almost muted. There are no Bud Foxes here; the characters are all smart, thoughtful, and (apparently) nice. In this way, Margin Call more almost resembles a horror movie as it builds a slow, dreadful suspense around these likable, almost ordinary characters.
Also like a horror movie, the action takes place in a single night and mostly in a single building. Speaking of which…
The Tower
The plot really takes off when Peter stays late at work and looks at Eric’s thumb drive. He discovers that it contains a complex financial projection which reveals that the company could go bankrupt literally overnight—perhaps that very night—due to its huge position in sub-prime assets. He calls his boss, Will (Paul Bettany), who has gone out drinking with the rest of the staff. Displaying an intelligence which is uncharacteristic of managers in such movies (and in real life), Will returns to work and calls his boss, Sam (Kevin Spacey).
Thus begins the essential rhythm of the movie. Like an inverted Dante’s Inferno, the movie takes us on a hellish journey through higher and higher levels of corporate evil as the crisis literally rises through the company’s corporate skyscraper over the course of the night. At one of the intermediate levels, Simon Baker does a particularly good job of playing a handsome and slick VP, Jared. But the real pay-off comes when we get to the top-floor and meet the Devil himself, as played by…
Jeremy Irons
Fittingly, the CEO of the company arrives near midnight. Swooping in like Lucifer on his corporate helicopter, John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) is about as different from Gordon Gekko as we can imagine: urbane, courtly, and self-deprecating. He’s also scary as hell. I love the scene where he listens with bemused patience as Peter explains the dimensions of the crisis. At the end of Peter’s disquisition, Tuld does not panic. Rather, he takes immediate, cold-blooded action. The company, he decides, will simply dump the toxic assets before the rest of the market catches on.
It’s a chilling moment, of course, but Irons takes it to the next level by suggesting a hidden depth to Tuld. He pauses at one point and an expression of dread passes over his face, as if even he senses the horror of what he is about to do. Then the moment passes, and he gets on with the business of blowing up the world.
It’s a Great moment in a Great performance by a Great actor. (Yes, all capital-Gs.)
The Creep on the Roof
It is interesting that the two most unabashedly corrupt characters in the movie are both English: Tuld and Will. Will seems like a younger version of Tuld—an intelligent man whose basic decency has been eroded by his years in the business. At one point in the night Will and Peter sneak up to the tower’s roof for a smoke. As they gaze out over the Manhattan skyline, Peter hesitantly asks Will whether the rumors about him are true: does he really make $2 million a year? Will matter-of-factly tells him he does, and goes on to enumerate how quickly even that absurd sum is spent. It’s a soliloquy that only an actor as skilled and soulful as Paul Bethany could pull off—part-confession, part lament. You can sell your soul to the devil, Will seems to tell Peter, but don’t forget to pay the IRS.
The Dog
If the movie presents us with a spectrum of morality, with evil old Tuld on one end and the innocent, wet-behind-the-ears Peter on the other, then Sam (Kevin Spacey) falls somewhere in the middle. He’s an old pro, yet still clings to a shred of ethical compunction. He wants to believe that the system can work, even as the night’s progression gradually proves otherwise.
Early in the film, Chandor symbolizes Sam’s moral struggle by introducing a subplot involving Sam’s dog, which is gravely ill. Dead dogs have become a cinematic cliche of late, but Chandor makes it work. Sam’s agonized decision to euthanize his dog (yes, lterally his best friend—perhaps his only firend) echoes the even more agonizing decision he faces that same night. Namely, whether to save his company by screwing the country.
Demi Moore
In a movie full of heavy-weight male actors like Irons, Spacey, Tucci, and Bethany, it’s great to see an overlooked actress like Demi Moore holding her own. In the role of Sarah Robertson, the coldly efficient manager who gets called into the midnight death-spiral, Moore puts so much distance between herself and the pouty Brat-Pack princess of her youth that the two personas seem to occupy separate geologic eras. She’s completely believable in the role, and when she gets scapegoated at the end, you almost feel sorry for her.
Math
One of the coolest things about this picture is the way mathematics underlines the plot. Dale, the recently fired analyst, is able to foresee the company’s impending doom by virtual of his complex mathematical models. The only other person smart to enough to understand these models is Peter (whom, we learn, is a former physicist).
Later, in the various boardrooms of the company, Peter has to try to explain the incredibly obstruce matheticas to his bosses. Like most of us, they don’t grasp the particulars, but they get the jist—their fortunes are about to go up in smoke.
And so the movie establishes its central theme, that of science-gone-amok. A kind of Frankenstein-like quality oozes from many of these characters—really smart guys who’ve used their brains to make money instead of improving the world. Eric himself seems to confess this in one the movie’s later scenes where he describes to Will how he was once an engineer, a bridge builder. With wry humor, he enumerates exactly how many millions of hours his bridges saved tired commuters over the years. It’s a sad counterpoint to the billions of dollars his company is about to lose.
The Call to Arms
Sam, having decided to go along with Tuld’s diabolical plan (he “needs the money” as he ruefully admits), he musters his troops to the sales floor and prepares them for battle. Their mission is to dump all of the company’s sub-prime stock in a matter of hours, before the market catches on and the price totally collapses. They all know that this might mean the end of their careers, but it’s okay—Sam promises each of them a golden parachute if they can pull it off. The subsequent scenes of these hapless young men and women tricking their former friends and colleagues into buying their junk are among the most chilling I’ve ever watched.
Dinner with the Devil
At the end of the movie, after the company has saved itself by nuking the American economy, Sam is called to a solo meeting with Tuld. Tuld, seated before a window looking out of over the city, is eating what we sense is a very expensive meal. Sam merely watches, dazed, as Tuld cheerfully explains how things have actually “worked out” rather well for the company. And as he eats his celebratory dinner, it’s almost as if he is feasting on Sam’s soul.
(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)
Ash Clifton, Writer 