Margin Call (***1/2)

Imagine you have a live hand grenade and have to decide whether to hold onto it, knowing it will explode, or toss it away, knowing it will kill or maim people around you. There you have the nub of this suspense drama whose entire plot, playing over the course of about 30 hours, would make a very good short story. I’m speaking broadly of course, which is how the characters, Wall Street traders, in the movie speak. They say things like “We’re gonna do this thing” and “Have you ever done anything like this?” Or “At the time there didn’t seem to be much of a choice,” to which the answer is “There never does.” To elliptical (yet pointed, precise) dialogue add a tense score, a dash of grim humor, and the night-time atmospherics of empty offices, and I found my attention held for an hour and a half.

Basically, writer-director J.C. Chandor (in his first feature) imagines a scenario whereby the now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers had been given a dire warning just before it was too late. Or maybe it’s based on a firm like Goldman Sachs, which outlasted the financial crisis. Despite a dash of moralizing, Chandor does not paint his characters as a pack of jackals, though Jeremy Irons, as the top man, comes close. Rather, he comes closer to saying that the money involved, all legal in this case, would be hard for anyone to resist. In fact, the two number-crunchers who issue the dire warning (Stanley Tucci and Zachary Quinto) are both engineers who wound up doing what—and here’s the moralizing—they both imply is a less useful, but more lucrative, application of their talents. Tucci’s character makes a big speech that rather hammers home the point.

The film has no one star, but Kevin Spacey, as the immediate boss of the number crunchers and the traders, comes the closest. Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, and Simon Baker play other higher ups at the firm. That they all seemed to have individual personalities despite the fairly limited screen time helps keep things interesting even though the plot moves slowly. Eventually, Spacey gets to make a compelling speech making the simultaneous case for tossing the hand grenade and holding it. Ultimately, the question is more interesting than the answer, and thus the ending is anticlimactic. If you have no idea what the title means, this movie may bore you. If you’re an expert on, or curious about, the financial collapse, you might wish for more financial nitty gritty. The entire plot hinges on the riskiness of mortgage-backed securities, but only one line in the script actually uses the word “mortgages.” But if you’re looking for a sharply focused, modern parable, this’ll do nicely.

IMDB link


viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 10/26/11