Margin Call

Margin Call is one of those movies that is interesting without really being good. It follows a trading firm’s strategizing to weather the impending economic turmoil of the housing market crash of 2008, after a couple of the analysts in their risk department discover the hidden volatility of the market. While it has some amount of behind the curtain peaking for people completely unfamiliar with how the wild world of finance functions, in the end it offers little of value either as an entertaining and taut story of survival for an organization whose back is against the wall or as a morality play about the nastiness that plagues much of high finance.

The movie is trying to be a lot smarter than it actually is. It comes across as this unholy concoction that is part Glengarry Glen Ross, part Moneyball, part 12 Angry Men, and part The Big Short, though this actually came out four years before The Big Short.

The film seems to want to make a point about the realities of cutthroat business practices, the dehumanization of employees and customers, and the lengths desperate men might go if their livelihoods are threatened. These are all things it has in common with Glengarry Glen Ross. Like The Big Short, the film wants to be a commentary on the 2008 financial collapse and the rotting underbelly of the finance sector that allowed it to happen. Like Moneyball, the film tries to take rather dull statistical analysis and infuse it with the real world meaning and consequences behind the otherwise dry figures and formulas. The film is intentionally small, focusing mostly on dialogue heavy exchanges in a series of ever fancier boardrooms populated by ever more wealthy and powerful individuals. This is similar to 12 Angry Men’s claustrophobic jury room and its heated debates, occasional sidebars, and emotionally charged monologues.

The problem is that Margin Call is nowhere near worth being mentioned in the same breath as those pictures. The story tries to be small and character driven, with minimal locations and lots of talking, almost feeling like a stage adaptation despite the lack of an actual theatrical antecedent. However, this falls flat as the characters and script are poor. The dialogue is stiff and full of empty pauses that believe themselves pregnant. Glengarry Glen Ross has Mamet’s unique snappy dialogue and 12 Angry Men has brilliant, fiery, character revealing clashes baked into the script. Margin Call has mostly empty talk that is laboriously delivered.

The Big Short tells a cautionary tale using the true story of how morally bankrupt people ruined the financial sector by manipulating or ignoring signs of economic instability for their own benefit. Moneyball uses a true story to demonstrate the difficult challenge of enacting systemic change, through a beautiful representation of not only the empirical truths underpinning that change, but the emotional truth of the results of that change. In Margin Call, the stakes of what is happening, both on an individual and societal level, are not communicated well enough. The characters aren’t likable enough and their challenges are not made tangible enough for us to care about whether a bunch of rich, predatory finance workers might lose their shirts. The film has no real emotional or moral center. There is nothing that makes you care about what happens in all these boardroom meetings, whether that is rooting for the firm’s success, rooting for any individual character’s success, or even rooting for everyone’s downfall. It acts like a morality play but it has no strong point of view, no perspective, no message, and very little else to redeem it.

The film ends up being a rather disappointing slice of life piece about a day in the life of some financial executives. The plot doesn’t really have an engine, despite all the manufactured tension around the impending financial collapse, and so not all that much happens that is interesting. There are a lot of drawn out boardroom meetings loaded with pauses that fake gravitas while torpedoing the pacing. In the end, it half-assedly makes some points about the rich getting richer and the faustian nature of some of these executive’s jobs but none of it lands because the narrative of the film doesn’t support it and the conclusion is too wishy washy to make any of it work as a devastating final twist.

Would Recommend: If you have a morbid fascination with the 2008 financial crash.

Would Not Recommend: If you are looking for quality hate-watch material about the evils of the financial sector.