Margin Call (2011)

To me, this movie is perfection.

Good start, but then it gets ruined

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Fascinating and well-told tale of a corporate melt-down with excellent ensemble cast, especially the always-appreciated Tucci as risk manager and Spacey as floor boss. I'm not going to say much more since the one positive change to Imdb is no more ten line rule. The story and the characters are textured and have a very realistic feel to them. It was only after seeing this 1 1/2 times that I realized the real-life context but that's not the point of the picture. It's about corporate lowest common denominator stupidity and chilling selfishness.

This film presents us with a group of traders who discover that, oops, they may have made a teeny, weeny error and are about to crash the bank, plunge the Western world into recession and cost millions of people their jobs and homes.As they scrabble to save their sorry backsides the film makers clearly hope that the viewer will feel sorry for them. This on the rather thin grounds that: 1. they're all terribly good-looking; 2. they're only doing what they've been told to do; 3. trading and making obscene amounts of money is 'all they've ever wanted to do' (yup, stand back, this guy has a dream); 4. the people they work for are even more hideous than they are.In a desperate bid to extract some sympathy from the viewer Kevin Spacey cries over his dead dog and attempts to flee the impending chaos, only to be reined back in by CEO Jeremy Irons. Mr Irons is allowed to retain his British accent to ensure that the American audience will immediately realize that he is a being of pure unadulterated evil. He snacks casually while Rome burns and offers Kevin a slice of puppy sandwich while insisting he sticks around to make yet more money.Well, these are the people who rule the world, film studios included, so I suppose they have to try to make you believe that they have redeeming qualities. Even if you don't, they all got off Scot free anyway so what you think of them is really of very little importance.

Have you seen "Margin Call" (2011)? For anyone whose career/job might have included an all-night session or two, the premise is not only realistic, the exhaustion-laced tension is palpable . . . due in no small part to a fine cast of actors with a great story and a near-perfect screenplay. Almost everything "fits" for the viewer, with the possible exception of some contrived internal tensions between the various players that are all but impossible to decipher.The direct connection to our Country's near financial meltdown of 2008 is obvious albeit bounced between factual and ridiculous . . . I can explain. The plot is laced with real buzzwords from the debacle, e.g., "MBS" (mortgage backed securities), "tranche" (a group with related characteristics); however, the concocted discovery trigger is a complicated mathematical formula that only a rocket scientist can unravel (the junior analyst's educational background).Financial experts and historians point to far less nuanced reasons for the real crisis, e.g., massive dealings in nearly worthless collateral, unprecedented fiscal stimulus, inadequate capital, and regulatory failures. Nevertheless the movie gets everything else exactly right, all the way down to an elevator discussion with a night shift cleaning lady stuck - and ignored - in the middle, very indicative of our largest investment firms and their rarefied masters of the universe world.

Margin Call is one very suspenseful movie that takes the viewer inside a Manhattan investment firm where the stock market brains and their bosses are forced to choose between saving their own hides or unleashing a financial Armageddon. The battle lies inside their own consciences. Most of them know they should have left years or months before the company reached this possible disaster but now they can't weasel out; it's a case of Us vs. Them, the many innocent bystanders who suffer the consequences. Kevin Spacey was excellent as the second tier boss who showed some conscience and his choice is critical. Jeremy Irons is a first-rate villain as the CEO, a man trained to make decisions and to ensure the financial interest of the firm. These two actors show the opposite sides of the battle lines. The two connect in a posh dining room overlooking Manhattan after the all-night strategy moves and meetings. Jeremy Irons offers his rendition of the scenario as he recounts successive stock market crashes over the past centuries, which he states are inevitable, and the choice is kill or be killed. In a gut-wrenching scene where the office is invaded by a trained team of dragon-slayers in suits, we see Stanley Tucci as the hedge fund analyst, who is fired and forced to leave on the spot. It is he who sees the ticking time bomb and alerts his colleagues; then he disappears on an all-night bender before they can contact him because the suits disabled his mobile phone. It is clear that this movie, made in 2011, was inspired by the stock market crash of 2008 and draws on the the divided views and hindsight over that turmoil. If you follow the stock market, you can recall the grim sensation of watching the lines of the graph slip into a free fall. Seven years after that panic, we are still feeling the effects. This movie recreates very vividly what might have happened behind the scenes. Great entertainment and a candid look at human behaviour!