Movie review: "Margin Call"

The 2011 movie "Margin Call" attempts to capture the start of the 2008 financial collapse by looking at the inside workings of a single financial company. If you're thinking this sounds like Lehman Brothers, the company whose failure triggered the meltdown of banks and brokerages, you've got the right idea.

There was a lot of real-life drama at the time of the collapse and you could imagine it making a good movie. But "Margin Call" is not it. Despite an all-star cast — Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci — the movie is undermined by a subpar script.

The entire story takes place in less than 24 hours, beginning with mass layoffs at the company. This is perhaps the best part of the movie, as it captures the heartlessness of the layoff process. Tucci's character. Eric Dale, is one of those to get the ax, but before he is escorted from the building, he asks former underling Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) to take a look at some research he has been working on.

Zachary Quinto in "Margin Call"

Sullivan looks at the data, crunches some numbers and goes — "Whoa!"  He shows others the numbers, and they all go "Uh oh," "Oh shit," and similar things. We never get to see what they're looking at and there is barely any effort to explain it, but the upshot is that they've realized their financial house of cards is about to fall.

There's a ton of angst, hand-wringing, and finger-pointing as a tight group of financial wizards and executives stay up all night.  But the movie's unwillingness or inability to explain the actual problem is terribly frustrating for the viewer. We don't understand why the company is in trouble, why it's melting down at this particular moment nor whether it has any real options.

It's as if the scriptwriters said "Financial stuff is too hard to explain, so we're not even going to try." That's weak. Smart movies figure out ways to explain complicated topics to the masses. 

By midway through the movie it's clear that the financial disaster is coming when the markets open in the morning. There's zero suspense, just more hand-wringing. It's a slow, melancholy slide to the inevitable.

It's somewhat disconcerting that while the angst continues into the wee hours of the night and even into the early morning, all the characters remain primly dressed with not a hair out of place, nor even a yawn.

One of the movie's biggest weaknesses is that it's just plain hard to feel any sympathy for characters that — as the movie clearly states — are making ungodly gobs of money. You know that even if they lose this job, they will find another similar lucrative one soon after. (You do feel a little sorry for Kevin Spacey's character after his dog dies, but that's a small moment.) 

A smart movie would have found a way to show how the actions of wealthy Wall Street fat cats affect everyday people.