margin call movie review new york times

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The 6th floor | the enthusiast: ‘margin call’, the enthusiast: ‘margin call’.

This week’s Enthusiast comes from Chris Pavone, author of the new novel “ The Expats ,” a thriller about an American couple living in Luxembourg.

I love this line of dialogue from “Margin Call,” as delivered by Jeremy Irons: “Please, speak as you might to a young child or a golden retriever. It wasn’t brains that got me here, I can assure you of that.”

Somehow the marketing machine for “Margin Call” never reached me while this movie was in theaters, so I only just saw it, and I’m glad I did. Everything about this lean, tense and even important account of the onset of the financial crisis is fantastic — the premise, the dialogue, the performances by an ensemble cast including Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Zachary Quinto and a brilliant Jeremy Irons as the chief of a Lehman-lookalike financial firm.

But what I like best (or what I find most horrifying, is probably more accurate) is the theme throughout — exemplified by this wonderful line — that the sleazy salesmen and smooth executives running Wall Street don’t really understand what they did (or, notably, what they’re still doing). And this after Irons arrives via helicopter at 4 a.m. to preside over the end of the world as we know it. It’s a sublime combination of smugness and humility and a wink at the myth that the meritocracy is infallible, all delivered with a beautiful smirk.

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It may have happened something like this. "Margin Call" depicts the last night of good times on Wall Street, as a deadly certainty travels up the executive ladder at an investment firm: Disastrous speculation in the mortgage markets is leading to the firm's collapse. We can still recall those days in the summer of 2008, during the Obama-McCain campaign, when America seemed awash in prosperity, and the stock market was setting records. Then one firm after another was forced to declare bankruptcy, the nation's economic structure was threatened, and Congress ponied up its huge bailout.

"Margin Call" begins on a day at an unnamed investment firm that must certainly have an inkling of what's coming, since 80 percent of the work force is laid off. One of the victims is Eric ( Stanley Tucci ), a senior risks analyst who like many of his colleagues was incapable of seeing that the real estate market was built as a house of cards. Although writer-director J.C. Chandor's film has sympathy for most of its characters, it is important to remember that they all felt they had to play along with the deals that were bringing their firms such huge profits and bonuses.

On his way out the door, Eric slips a USB drive to Peter ( Zachary Quinto ), a younger analyst who wasn't fired. There's information on it that disturbs him. So it should. While the office is empty, and the survivors are out partying to celebrate not being fired, Peter realizes the firm and the market are clearly trembling on the brink. He contacts his supervisor, Will ( Paul Bettany ), who takes one look and calls his boss, Sam ( Kevin Spacey ). Others are called in for an all-night emergency meeting until at dawn as a helicopter brings in CEO John Tuld ( Jeremy Irons ).

You don't need to understand a lot about the markets to follow the film. John is a cool, polished Brit who likes to say things like, "Speak to me in plain terms," because his job requires him to manage the corporation but not necessarily understand its business. Indeed, as we now know, a fresh young college graduate could have looked at the balance sheets and clearly seen Wall Street was doomed.

It is up to John to make the margin call. In other words, to order his company to start dumping worthless holdings before the word spread that they are worthless — essentially, betraying their customers. It has now been established that some firms created hedge funds intended to fail, so they could make money betting against them. These they sold to their customers knowing they were worthless.

I think the movie is about how its characters are concerned only by the welfare of their corporations. There is no larger sense of the public good. Corporations are amoral, and exist to survive and succeed, at whatever human cost. This is what the Occupy Wall Street protesters are angry about: They are not against capitalism, but about Wall Street dishonesty and greed.

"Margin Call" employs an excellent cast who can make financial talk into compelling dialogue. They also can reflect the enormity of what is happening: Their company and their lives are being rendered meaningless. This scenario was enacted at many Wall Street institutions on the autumn of 2008, and fundamental financial reform is still being opposed. No particular firm is named, but doesn't it seem to you that the name of the Jeremy Irons character, "John Tuld," has an echo of Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, who collected enormous bonuses for leading his company into bankruptcy?

Irons is sly in the role, a man who knows his own financial stability is unassailable, who considers his job as an amoral exercise, who has made it to the top by not particularly caring about people. A great corporate executive must have a strain of ruthlessness. I also admired Kevin Spacey, who projects incisive intelligence in his very manner, and Demi Moore , as a senior executive who has risen to just below the glass ceiling and knows she will stay there.

The physical world of the film itself is effective. It's all glass, steel and protocol, long black cars and executive perks, luxurious lifestyles paid for with what was inescapably fraud. One of the characters has a sick dog. The dog is the only creature in the entire film that anyone likes.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Brian tallerico, film credits.

Margin Call (2011)

Rated R for language

107 minutes

Kevin Spacey as Sam Rogers

Paul Bettany as Will Emerson

Jeremy Irons as John Tuld

Zachary Quinto as Peter Sullivan

Penn Badgley as Seth Bregman

Simon Baker as Jared Cohen

Mary McDonnell as Mary Rogers

Demi Moore as Sarah Robertson

Stanley Tucci as Eric Dale

Written and directed by

J.C. Chandor

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'Margin Call': A Movie Occupied With Wall Street

David Edelstein

Kevin Spacey gives "a major performance, his best in a decade," as a Wall Street executive trying to do the right thing in the middle of a financial panic.

Margin Call

Director: J.C. Chandor
Genre: Thriller
Running Time: 105 minutes

Rated R; some language.

With: Zachary Quinto, Stanley Tucci, Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore

(Recommended)

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The timing is almost too good: a terrific Wall Street melodrama at the moment the Occupy Wall Street protests are building. We haven't seen the like since Three Mile Island had a near-meltdown a couple of days after The China Syndrome exploded into theaters. Now, Margin Call seems anything but marginal.

The movie opens with a chilling vision: Layoff specialists march into a mighty New York financial firm and give various employees the bad news — among them risk-management whiz Eric Dale, played by Stanley Tucci, a peerless character actor who signals more emotion by clenching and unclenching his jaw than performers who weep and moan.

The boss on the floor is Sam Rogers, played by Kevin Spacey. Called on to give a pep talk, he emerges from his office, stone-faced, and tells his remaining employees not to feel bad for their laid-off comrades. You guys, he says, have survived the purge. You're the winners.

These aren't sympathetic people, yet writer-director J.C. Chandor does build some sympathy for them. He frames the action as if this were a disaster picture like Earthquake or The Towering Inferno : At times we find ourselves rooting for the firm's survival despite the fact that its executives are actively promoting worthless assets.

Partly, that's because we like Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), the risk-management underling who figures out what's coming and calls his half-drunk boss (Paul Bettany), who calls his boss, who calls his. We follow Sullivan — who, being a former rocket scientist, is the only person who can explain what's happening — up the corporate ladder one rung at a time, until he finally arrives at the big man. (Jeremy Irons, who lands at 2 a.m. on the roof in a helicopter.)

A junior analyst (Zachary Quinto, left) and his colleague (Penn Badgley) find the flaw in the formula that could bring down their company — and the economy.

What precisely is happening to the firm's finances? It's too byzantine for most of the executives, let alone a movie critic, to figure out — but to a person they look at Sullivan's equations and are instantly spooked by the prospect of complete economic conflagration. They'll be left holding obviously toxic assets — unless they act fast .

Margin Call has a moral center of a sort. Spacey's Rogers turns out to be cold but not sociopathic, and there's a line he is loath to cross: a fire sale of said assets dumped on unsuspecting customers, many of whom will go bust.

Spacey gives a major performance, his best in a decade, and Quinto, best known as the new Mr. Spock, has a very un-Vulcan vulnerability. Simon Baker is deliciously repellent as the least shamefaced Master of the Universe, and Demi Moore as the lone female top executive underplays and gives the performance of her life: She's a woman who has given up everything to rise so high — and knows she'll be first in line to take the fall. Although Irons is a little too Boris Karloff-creepy for my taste, the tender way he drops the hammer on Moore will haunt my dreams for a long time.

Margin Call is a different sort of big-business film than its best-known predecessor, Oliver Stone's Wall Street . Stone wanted to create a capitalist demon in Gordon Gekko, but ended up making him so charismatic that he became a role model. Despite the amounts of money bandied about, there's nothing in Margin Call to inspire anyone — except, of course, those fervent Wall Street occupiers. (Recommended)

Margin Call and the financial thriller

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

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Margin Call, the latest in a line of films on the crash of 2008, depicts a Wall Street investment bank’s last ditch attempts to save itself from impending disaster. Written and directed by first time feature director J.C.Chandor – and starring Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore and Jeremy Irons – The New Yorker called it “the best Wall Street movie ever made”. It’s been marketed as a thriller – but how do you create excitement when the action consists of men in suits peering at computer screens and talking on Blackberries? Does Margin Call have anything new to say on the much-debated causes of the collapse? Andrew Hill, FT management editor, puts these questions to Alex Preston, ex-City trader and author of This Bleeding City; Peter Aspden, FT arts writer; and Leo Robson, film and television critic. Produced by Griselda Murray Brown

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Entertainment

‘Margin Call’ is a timely Wall Street thriller

"Margin Call," an excellent Wall Street thriller directed by J.C. Chandor and starring Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons and Zachary Quinto, is a remarkably timely story about a firm whose assets turn out to be built on fog and mirrors. Taut, smart and well-acted, the film is playing at several Seattle-area theaters.

A horror story told in dark conference rooms and starkly elegant corporate offices, “Margin Call” takes place during a long night’s journey into day in 2008, when executives at a Wall Street investment firm learn that something is terribly, terribly wrong. It starts with a scene in which a manager named Eric (Stanley Tucci) is fired, in the soulless way of Anna Kendrick’s character in “Up in the Air.” (After getting the ax, he’s handed a brochure optimistically titled “Looking Ahead.”) Leaving the building, he hands a flash drive to a junior employee, Peter (Zachary Quinto). Take a look at this, Eric says, adding an ominous, “Be careful.”

And so begins a taut, smart and remarkably timely thriller, as we watch person after person (well, man after man, with only one exception) learn that their company’s empire is built on fog and mirrors. Writer/director J.C. Chandor has assembled a strong cast in well-cut business suits: Tucci, that master of the subtle eye-roll, is memorable in just a few scenes; the handsome Quinto demonstrates leading-man chops; and Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Simon Baker and Demi Moore all acquit themselves nicely.

Chandor struggles a bit with making the complex financial subject matter clear; one too many characters says, “Explain it to me in plain English” too obviously for the sake of the audience (though, as running gags go, it’s a funny one). And the sameness of the settings makes the movie seem a bit like a filmed play — one from David Mamet, for example, with a little less swearing. But as a snapshot of a moment in time, “Margin Call” is often mesmerizing. “The ground is shifting below our feet,” notes one character; he didn’t yet know how much.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or [email protected]

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Margin Call Reviews

Afterward, we have a better understanding of the apathy that permeated our economy’s ongoing crisis, which, depending on your outlook, either focuses or alleviates your anger over the situation.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 6, 2023

Even though Chandor isn't trying to turn his characters into something abominable, the truth is that each of them is, on a bigger or lesser scale, an evil to society. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 21, 2022

Everyone thinks this movie is a fairly routine, not particularly notable drama...my love for Margin Call boils down to it being the one film that, more than any other, seems to understand the modern workplace.

Full Review | Jun 3, 2022

Margin Call opts to show us that there are no heroes and villains, only villains and victims and poor souls weighing the merits of a Faustian bargain.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 1, 2021

The film is practically hijacked by Kevin Spacey, though, as a far more complex corporate dirtbag than he usually plays.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 15, 2020

Though an excessively talky affair, the screenplay's abundance of great dialogue and powerful storytelling smarts casts a dazzling spell.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 20, 2020

You can tell a story out of anything, and you can tell a story about anybody, but the more technical the story gets and the more unsympathetic the characters become make telling that story harder. Margin Call is very well told.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Jul 17, 2020

Chandor has a real knack for capturing the airless, cutthroat dimension to the modern workplace.

Full Review | Jan 17, 2020

Though perhaps trying a little too hard at times to project a macro-profundity on its banks imploding thesis, Margin Call gets most of its tactics just right.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 13, 2019

Margin Call is like a submarine movie: a chamber piece that sends us on a claustrophobic descent into the depths of the financial crisis.

Full Review | Aug 7, 2019

Even with its mostly even handed approach it remains mostly dry and clinical, lacking in fire and directorial spark.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 6, 2019

Chandor manages to induce a certain amount of unease and dread in the initial proceedings. But what begins like a prophetic Wall Street set John Grisham novel quickly becomes a stalemate of soliloquies.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jun 27, 2019

Margin Call is worth seeing for its cast and for its intentions, but it's easy to imagine how the whole thing could have been done better.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Feb 8, 2019

Not only does it offer no new insights into an issue everyone needs to understand; it's also about as enthralling as watching an investment banker pace his office all day while alternately talking and yelling into the telephone glued onto his ear.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 5, 2019

Vague on details regarding the company or the reasons for its impending demise, the film is far more meticulous in painting the possible final hours for this company that unfolds almost like a reverse werewolf tale.

Full Review | Dec 21, 2018

Positively devastating.

Full Review | Sep 14, 2018

Chandor is at times fortunate to have such a talented cast, all of whom provide strong performances.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 29, 2018

Margin Call ranks among the top dramas ever made about Wall Street.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 14, 2018

Margin Call effectively portrays these masters of the universe as flawed folk who were just as ill-informed, unaware and ultimately scared of losing it all as the general public.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 21, 2017

The movie is about gamesmanship and ruthlessness and what it takes to find room at the top. And stay there.

Full Review | Aug 30, 2017

Margin Call Review

13 Jan 2012

107 minutes

Margin Call

At one point during the long night of the soul that makes up Margin Call, Jeremy Irons’ Tuld, the vampiric head of a tottering investment bank, observes, “There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter or cheat.” A prescient mantra for the current business age, the purity of the sentiment encapsulates the scalpel-like precision that J. C. Chador’s debut picks over the carcass of modern greed. Part thriller, part horror, part workplace tragi-comedy, all cautionary tale, this is a sharp film about sharp men (and Demi Moore) in sharp suits that makes Wall Street: 2 look like amped-up panto.

With its study of bruising machismo in tight spaces revealed through vital verbiage, Margin Call owes more than a debt to David Mamet in general and Glengarry Glen Ross in particular. But Chandor’s dialogue has none of Mamet’s grandstanding. Instead, the talk is terse, but the coolness with which they discuss nuclear options — dump all their mortgage bundles before the market realises they’re worthless but risk ruining their credibility forever — rings frighteningly true.

Chandor’s screenplay charts Sullivan’s seismic findings up the company ladder, each embodied by a terrific performance; from cynical foot soldier (Paul Bettany) to head trader (Kevin Spacey) to potential fall gal (Demi Moore) to Irons’ CEO. This superb ensemble only get quietly fractious meetings and harried phone calls to establish character, but everyone registers. It is Zachary Quinto (adding another great logician to his CV) and Stanley Tucci who propel the first half, and Spacey and the charming-but-scary Irons who dominate the second. Spacey, in particular, is great, adding a gentility to his normal acid-smart persona — his grieving for his dying dog may be an obvious metaphor, but Spacey makes it affecting.

There is a nice running gag that the higher up the chain of command we go, the weaker their command of financial mumbo-jumbo is. As much as it is about finance, it is also great on office politicking, from the agonies of mass redundancies to the etiquette of corporate hierarchies. It doesn’t shy from exposing avarice and moral myopia but this neither condemns nor glorifies the barbarians. Instead it humanises them, to such an extent it might turn your hatred of the one per cent into pity.

Movies | 21 01 2016

Movies | 09 06 2015

Movies | 21 12 2011

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Margin Call

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Want to be a fly on the wall when a gaggle of investment bankers precipitate the 2008 financial crisis? Step up for Margin Call , a thrillingly intense look at what went down through the prism of one unnamed Wall Street investment firm trying to save its ass before Armageddon. Writer-director J.C. Chandor, whose father toiled for Merrill Lynch, makes an impressive debut by focusing the action on a 24-hour period that starts with staff layoffs. One of the shitcanned is Eric Dale (a reliably superb Stanley Tucci), a manager who shares the smell of disaster with his protégé Peter Sullivan (a very fine Zachary Quinto, one of the film’s producers). It looks like the future losses will exceed the firm’s total market capitalization. Peter and his colleague, Seth Bregman (Penn Badgley), call in their boss, Will Emerson (Paul Bettany), who brings in his chief, Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey).

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Before total panic, Sam consults with even bigger guns – Jared Cohen (Simon Baker, wily perfection) and Sarah Robertson (Demi Moore, silkily effective) – and then the firm’s CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) descends from the sky in a chopper and all hell breaks loose. Chandor doesn’t take the documentary approach of Inside Job or amp things up like Oliver Stone in his Wall Street films. He’s measuring the human cost at stake. Every actor is first-rate. Spacey is at the top of his game. And Irons is stingingly funny as he addresses Quinto’s character, a former rocket scientist at M.I.T.. Like all of us, Tuld wants a simple explanation. “Speak to me like a small child or a golden retriever,” he implores. Margin Call is an explosive drama that speaks lucidly and scarily to the times we live in. As Tuld says, “There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.”

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MARGIN CALL Review

Margin Call review. Matt reviews J.C. Chandor's Margin Call starring Kevin Spacey, Zachary Quinto, Paul Bettany, Stanley Tucci, and Jeremy Irons.

The 2008 economic collapse is one of the major events of our lifetimes and some filmmakers have rushed to turn the events into A Very Serious and Important Movie. J.C. Chandor's Margin Call would like to be that movie. It dresses up its respected cast in fine suits, puts them in the financial world, and then has them look at computer monitors and say "Fuck me..." in astonishment about 80-90 times throughout the course of the film. Chandor wants to bury the audience in the world of financial intrigue and corruption without doing the hard work of explaining the machinations of that world in any kind of detail. He gets away with it for the first half-hour as the audience becomes wrapped in a propulsive, plot-driven drama, but by the end the only saving grace is Kevin Spacey playing against type.

Margin Call takes place over a 24-hour time period in a major financial firm. The day begins with an executive in risk management ( Stanley Tucci ) getting fired, but before he leaves the building he gives a thumb-drive to his employee ( Zachary Quinto ) with the warning, "Be careful." The employee, a former rocket scientist, cracks the data on the thumb-drive and calls his superior ( Paul Bettany ) who looks at the data and says, "Fuck me..." He then calls his superior (Spacey) who looks at the data and says, "Fuck me..." He then calls his superiors ( Simon Baker and Demi Moore ), "Fuck me...", up the chain, and so forth until it reaches the big boss ( Jeremy Irons ).

Despite the repetition, Chandor is able to keep the momentum and drive of his script going throughout the first act, but then the story and momentum collapse as the particulars of this financial firm become less and less believable. Movies like this are usually filled with technical jargon and require an audience surrogate so another character can explain the complexities in layman's terms. That audience surrogate should not be a higher-up. Quinto has to explain to Spacey that the data means the company has loads of crap on its books based on shoddy projections and that the firm will be dead in a few weeks if they can't get rid of it. Later, Quinto has to explain to Irons that how the crap came from the mortgage market. Both Spacey and Irons have lines like "You know I don't understand this stuff," and "Explain it to me like you would a child."

Chandor may be trying to imply that the fault of the financial meltdown was from sheer recklessness and stupidity, but that's a simplistic and inaccurate understanding of the crisis. Spacey's character may be a salesman whose best trait is his ability to inspire his employees, but we have to believe he doesn't understand financial figures and the value of his product. We also have to believe that Irons' character stumbled out of the ether, and idiotically took over a financial institution. If Chandor truly believes this, then he has essentially removed any blatant greed or criminality from financial firms. Even if this fictional company isn't meant to stand in for a dead firm like Lehman Brothers or Bear Sterns, we still have to believe that nobody knew anything and that simply isn't true.

When you remove that responsibility, then Margin Call could not come at a worst time. There's no tragedy at play since these character have no one else to blame and the movie only plays to an audience that thinks, "Boy, I hope these rich Wall Street executives make it out okay." The story lacks drama and insight because most of the characters wander around dumbstruck by the impending calamity and only Bettany hits upon the salient point that the American people will be furious at the Street for the collapse, but no one asked where the money was coming from as long as it kept rolling in. It's an idea that would work far better if Chandor ever took a step outside the firm and introduced an everyman who could not only serve as an audience surrogate, but also as a representative of how the collapse will affect the average person. But there is barely any world beyond the firm and we have to spend time with empty suits worrying about their jobs.

The only character we only get to know is Spacey's (although Tucci gets a meaningless speech about a bridge he built), and the respected actor does a great job playing against type. We all know he can do a heartless executive in his sleep and he's also played the high-profile fraud with his portrayal of Jack Abramoff in Casino Jack . But in Margin Call , his character is faced with a moral choice, which makes him one of the story's few sympathetic characters. The film lets him off the hook with his ignorance of how the meltdown happened, but it puts him in the driver's seat for how he's going to react. There's no smarm to Spacey's performance and it's a nice change of pace for the actor.

Unfortunately Margin Call wastes the rest of its talented cast by making them nothing more than plastic figures moving around a poorly constructed play set (Note to toy manufacturers: do not make the Financial Firm Play Set). The devil is in the details and Chandor wants to make a movie without devils or even people. We need a good film about the financial collapse, but if Margin Call is the best we can get, then fuck me...

‘Margin Call’: A movie for the Occupy Wall Street movement?

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In 2009, when director J.C. Chandor and producers Zachary Quinto and Neal Dodson were trying to raise the financing for ‘Margin Call,’ their $3.4-million thriller about the 2008 financial crisis, the conventional wisdom in Hollywood was that audiences were likely to lose interest in Wall Street stories.

‘The initial response from agents was, ‘You know they’re making ‘Wall Street 2,’ right?’’ said Dodson. Also in the works were other downturn-focused projects, such as ‘Company Men,’ ‘Inside Job,’ Michael Moore’s ‘Capitalism: A Love Story’ and HBO’s ‘Too Big to Fail.’ ‘They’re like, ‘Can the market hold another film about this subject?’’

Fast-forward two years and ‘Margin Call,’ which opens Oct. 21 and stars Quinto, Penn Badgley, Kevin Spacey and Paul Bettany as investment bank workers on the eve of the crisis, is starting to look perfectly timed as the Occupy Wall Street protests continue to grow.

The protest movement, now in its fourth week since launching in New York City’s Zuccotti Park in mid-September, has grown from its downtown Manhattan roots to include several other cities, including Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. The chief complaint of the protesters — that government and financial sector policies contribute to income inequality — is addressed by ‘Margin Call,’ in which Quinto plays a financial analyst who makes a frightening discovery about his firm’s overly optimistic economic projections.

‘None of us could have anticipated the timing, with Occupy Wall Street happening right now and all of these people rising up to demand that this be looked at and dealt with,’ Quinto said in an interview at the Silver Lake offices of his production company, Before the Door, last week. ‘It’s incredibly vitalizing for me to have this upheaval and all this attention being paid to this sector of the culture. I feel really energized by that.’

Quinto was on his way to New York to promote the film, where his costar, Badgley, has already visited the Occupy Wall Street protests to take in the scene.

‘I’m not opposed to going down there myself and seeing what the energy is like and talking to people,’ Quinto said. ‘I can just imagine myself handing out fliers for ‘Margin Call,’ like, ‘If you’re unhappy… .’ We’ll see. Hopefully they’ll find their own way to it. ‘

While ‘Margin Call’ attempts to explain the human choices that helped create the current economic malaise, that doesn’t necessarily mean that financially frustrated audiences will rush to see it.

‘It’s a little nerve-racking,’ said Chandor, who wrote the script and whose father worked in the financial industry. ‘This is essentially a character piece. It’s trying to look into why people make the decisions that they do. In a lot of cases it’s not about pure greed. We hope there’s not fatigue, that people aren’t seeing so much mayhem in their real lives that they aren’t willing to see this movie.’

Movie review: ‘Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps’

TV review: ‘Too Big to Fail’

-- Rebecca Keegan

twitter.com/@thatrebecca

Former staff writer Rebecca Keegan covered film at the Los Angeles Times until 2016 and is the author of “The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron.” Prior to joining The Times, she was the Hollywood correspondent for Time magazine. A native of New York State, she graduated from Northwestern University.

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Yahoo Finance

Margin call: a realistic wall street movie.

Is America ready for a nuanced movie about Wall Street and the 2008 financial crisis?

We're about to find out, as Margin Call , which debuted last week, goes into wider release.

New York Times film critic A.O. Scott gave the small-budget film with a big-name cast — Demi Moore, Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, Paul Bettany and Simon Baker -- a rave review , calling it "a tale of greed, vanity, myopia and expediency that is all the more damning for its refusal to moralize."

Your humble correspondent was somewhat less impressed. I saw the movie at its Manhattan premiere at a theater on the Lower East Side — an unlikely locale, given that the neighborhood has long been a hotbed of anti-capitalist sentiment. A couple of blocks down the street is the Red Square building, probably the only luxury building with a statue of Lenin at the top . A few miles to the southeast, protesters are occupying Wall Street. (Highlights of the premiere: Demi Moore, looking extremely thin and Kutcher-less; teen heartthrob Chace Crawford there to support his Gossip Girl castmate Penn Badgely; and Liev Schreiber, incognito in worker's cap.)

Margin Call tells the story of a long day in the life of a Wall Street firm, kind of like Lehman Brothers, trying to survive in the fall of 2008. The problem: The model on which its highly leveraged bets on complicated assets are based turns out to be wrong. Despite the high-profile cast, writer and director J.C. Chandor doesn't dilute or glam-up the story to seek broader appeal. The trading floor isn't the pulsating killing field of Oliver Stone's Wall Street films, but rather a few rows of terminals. The views from the top of the building are spectacular, but the offices are generally drab. Perennial sexpot Demi Moore, who plays a finance executive, is borderline frumpy. Unlike the HBO movie Too Big Too Fail , which featured occasional caricatures of familiar characters, Margin Call doesn't dumb down the complex backstory; you'll hear terms like VAR (value at risk) and MBS (mortgage-backed securities) bandied about.

Unlike the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job , Margin Call is less interested in investigating systemic failures than it is in looking into human frailties. What happens when an organization faces a crisis and its survival is in doubt? Who steps up, who is sacrificed and who is willing to compromise his beliefs?

Margin Call does offer a highly realistic view of Wall Street firms. Characters like Paul Bettany's hard-bitten player display the mixture of insecurity and hauteur that fuel the financial services world. Zachary Quinto, Spock in the most recent Star Trek , is a ph.d. in physics from M.I. T. who now runs financial models instead of figuring out how to keep spaceships aloft. The higher the rung on the organizational ladder, the better the suits and haircuts -- and the less the executives seem to know or care about how the company is making its money. Jeremy Irons, who plays the vulpine CEO John Tuld, parachutes in via helicopter, and doesn't deign to descend to the floor where the action is taking place.

Like real people on Wall Street, the characters in Margin Call are very interested in making money, and not much else. The long-term vision extends about as far as the year-end bonus for the junior people, and for the current quarter at the top. And they're fatalistic; some trades work, some trades don't. Some people make money, and others lose it. People get downsized or blow up all the time. If you're asked to be a scapegoat, take the generous severance package, cash in your options and move on. In order to ensure the survival of the century-old firm, the remaining executives have to dump huge positions of mortgage-backed securities and other toxic assets quickly. Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), a 34-year veteran of the firm, argues that doing so will hurt the firm's customers and clients. But in a crisis, firms worry about themselves first and everybody else last.

The film is sharply written and fast-paced despite the absence of fireworks. In the end, though, Margin Call lets Wall Streeters off easily — and not because there's no single, Madoff-esque villain. The model and the markets went against the company. But the story was never that simple. You can blame policy and government and the Fed and Black Swans all you want. But in the end, the financial crisis of 2008 was the product of a series of extremely stupid moves made by people who should have known better, and who were paid huge amounts to know much, much better. Lehman Brothers could have survived the meltdown in the markets in 2008 — if only its executives and board hadn't decided that running an investment bank with 30:1 leverage was a great idea.

Wall Street II resolved with an improbable happy ending. By contrast, Margin Call has a more realistic denouement. The firm survives, and some of the traders and executives still have their jobs. But they're diminished, demoralized, in need of a hug and support. Yet nobody seems to be going home to anybody. In one of the final scenes, Spacey's character is weeping over his dead dog in the front yard of his ex-wife's house.

An obvious metaphor? Sure. On Wall Street, you may have temporary allies, colleagues and co-workers. But if you want a true friend, you'd better get a dog.

Daniel Gross is economics editor at Yahoo! Finance.

Follow him on Twitter @grossdm; email him at [email protected] .

His most recent book is Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation.

The Ending Of Margin Call Explained

Sam Rogers looking concerned in board room

The 2011 financial thriller "Margin Call” explores the origins of the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. Caused in large part by the boom-and-bust of the U.S. housing market in the early-to-mid 2000s, as well as investment banks selling mortgage-backed securities, the "Great Recession" sank the world into the deepest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression from the 1920s to the 1940s. While Wall Street tumbled, Main Street reeled, with trillions of dollars in economic growth lost and millions losing not only their homes, but their jobs. The echoes of the crisis reverberated through people's lives for years; some never recovered.

"Margin Call" unfolds at an unnamed investment bank where, during a round of layoffs, a young analyst (Zachary Quinto) discovers the firm's risky trading has potentially led not only to the organization's demise, but to a potential market collapse. Over the course of 24 hours, the firm must decide how to proceed knowing there is no going back. "Margin Call" is a taut Wall Street drama that's not just about the numbers — it's also a story of the very human choices and circumstances that led to this economic and societal catastrophe. The conclusion of the film can't be understood by mere spreadsheets, and its characters' moral ambiguities live outside a financial algorithm. So let's explain the ending of "Margin Call" and explore how small choices can lead to big trouble.

What you need to remember about the plot of Margin Call

In "Margin Call," it's 2008 and a heavy round of layoffs is taking place at an unnamed investment bank. Head of risk management Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) is fired, and as he's escorted from the building, Dale passes a flash drive of his work to young associate, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto). He asks Sullivan to finish the work located on the drive, but Dale warns Sullivan to "be careful." Completing Dale's work that night, Sullivan discovers the bank is on an inevitable path to failure due to the firm's over-leveraged assets.

Sullivan, along with analyst Seth Bregman ( Penn Badgley ), trader Will Emerson (Paul Bettany), and Emerson's boss, Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), attend an emergency meeting with an executive team that includes Jeremy Cohen (Simon Baker) and Chief Risk Management Officer Sarah Robertson (Demi Moore). Cohen and Robertson conclude Sullivan's report checks out, but it's not a startling revelation to the higher-ups. Rather, it serves as a receipt for their knowingly risky behavior.

With the bank on the brink of ruin, CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) is summoned to the office, and it's determined that a fire sale of the toxic assets will save the company. The liquidation sale risks the bank's industry reputation, the careers of its employees, and broader market stability. Tuld ultimately decides it's better for the firm to be the first to sell in order to survive a seemingly inevitable collapse of the financial market.

What happens at the end of Margin Call

At the end of the film, the firm moves forward with the fire sale. Despite his trepidations and knowing that it will destroy the careers of many of his employees, Rogers rallies his traders, and the firm successfully liquidates many of its assets. Many traders lose their jobs, including Bregman. Emerson, whose trading prowess we follow as the fire sale unfolds, makes the cut. Sullivan, a Ph.D.-level rocket scientist who is ambivalent about working at the firm, is promoted for his efforts and is now seen as a valuable asset to the firm's recovery.

The firm's management team doesn't fare much better. Dale, who was unceremoniously fired the day before, is all but forced back to work, his severance and benefits held hostage unless he comes back. His work uncovered the crisis, and the firm wants to keep him close. Robertson is pushed out by Tuld, made to publicly take responsibility for the firm's failure, but Cohen stays. While Rogers successfully commandeers the fire sale, he wants out of his job. He confronts Tuld, asking him how they messed up so badly. Tuld sees the day's events as just another moment in historic market volatility. For Tuld, money is merely an imaginary concept that keeps civilization in order. His firm survives the day, and Tuld is already focused on future potential profits from the downturn. Tuld wants Rogers to stay. Disillusioned but in need of the money, Rogers continues working at the firm.

Greed and success go hand in hand

At the firm, success depends on employees' ability to embrace their own greed and selfishness. Some, like Tuld and Emerson, rationalize their greed as a reaction to outside systems. Tuld believes that the markets can't be controlled, one simply reacts to them. Through this twisted logic, he is able to absolve himself of personal responsibility for the societal misery brought on by his choices. Tuld believes there are always winners and losers.

Emerson, meanwhile, justifies his work as merely giving people what they want. If they want to afford big houses and fancy cars, Emerson thinks, he's the one who moves the money to make it happen. Both men understand how their choices affect society but show little concern for any negative outcomes. Because in their minds, if they're not holding power or making money, then someone else will.

For other characters, their greed manifests in acts of quiet self-interest. When Rogers leaves the room when Cohen and Robertson discuss Sullivan's findings, he's asked to stay and possibly help in their predicament. Instead, he leaves, telling them that willful ignorance about the hard data and problems facing the company is how he's been at the firm so long. For Rogers, ignorance is not only bliss — it's a survival tactic. To Sullivan, his work at the firm is just numbers, and he's only there because of the good pay. Ironically, it's the openly money-obsessed Bregman, who, only when faced with his inevitable firing, thinks outside of himself and contemplates how the firm's actions will hurt regular people.

Why build bridges when investment banking pays so much better?

Many of the firm's employees didn't start their careers in finance, but enticed by the enormous payouts of investment banking, they ditched their more humble and noble work for Wall Street. Before joining the firm, Dale worked as an engineer. He tells Emerson about how he designed a bridge that saved drivers hours of their life commuting, thus improving their quality of life. Sullivan, a literal rocket scientist, works at the firm because, he says, it pays better than science.

Both Dale and Sullivan traded in their altruistic careers for well-paying positions at the firm but — at least for Dale — it has come at a high price. When Emerson tries to get Dale to return to the firm with promises of a big payday, Dale responds, "I've been paid enough already." He's been there, done that, and was fired unceremoniously after nearly 20 years on the job. He knows what his work has revealed about the firm and doesn't like it, and he laments the intangibility and uselessness of his work with the firm compared to his more civic-minded past career in engineering. Meanwhile, newbie Sullivan is rewarded with a promotion for completing Dale's work. While we understand possibilities that Dale has seemingly squandered for investment banking, Sullivan bolted for Wall Street early in his scientific career, so we don't know the scientific potential Sullivan abandoned by joining the firm. However, at the end of the movie when he is seated in the executive dining room, Sullivan's trepidatious glance at Rogers implies it's a lot.

What did senior leadership know before the meeting?

When an emergency meeting is called to pore over Dale's now-completed report, we assume it's to alert the executive team about potentially new, perilous information. Sullivan, Bregman, and Emerson are shocked by their findings and jump to warn senior leadership. Turns out, the senior leadership was already aware of the firm's troubles. During the meeting, Rogers whispers to Robertson that he warned her about potential trouble last year and that if she had listened to him, they wouldn't be in this position now. So not only did Dale know, but Rogers and Robertson did, too.

Later, when Cohen and Robertson speak alone, we learn that Cohen was also in on the information. They know consequences are in order and attempt to formulate a strategy as to how they will handle their boss, Tuld. It's not that they want to reveal insights to Tuld, but they want to manage him now that the report's findings are known. They're keeping no secrets from the CEO because Tuld knew about the toxic assets as well. Rogers acknowledges that Tuld is working with more information than he has, and when Tuld fires Robertson, she makes it clear that she, Cohen, and Tuld had some sort of pact around what they were doing. While the exact extent of their knowledge is never revealed, it's safe to say firm leadership had lots of information about their toxic position well before the movie takes place.

Dale and Robertson know the firm has the power

Eric Dale was merely doing his job by digging into the precarious trading practices of the firm, and for his efforts, he was laid off. Emerson implies his firing was at the hands of Sarah Robertson, and Dale clearly regrets that he went to her last year — but what for is not revealed. As he walks out of the building, Dale spots Robertson and confronts her. She doesn't deny his accusations that she had anything to do with his firing, and she walks into the building flustered. There's unspoken tension between Dale and Robinson, and soon we learn why.

With the emergency meeting well underway, it's revealed that Robertson and Cohen knew about the firm's risky trading practices, and now Dale's work (completed by Sullivan) has exposed them. Robertson wants assurance from Cohen that they will go down together, but he doesn't give it to her. When Tuld fires Robertson and asks her to take a public fall for the firm instead of Cohen, she reminds him that she warned both him and Cohen about the impending catastrophe. Tuld urges her not to protest the decision, and she reluctantly obeys. She eventually finds herself sequestered in the same room as Dale, who is now back with the firm after they threatened to mess with his severance package. Dale and Robertson are trapped by the firm, both literally and figuratively. The firm has the power, and feeling there's little they can do to fight back, Dale and Robertson accept their fates.

Rogers' dog days on Wall Street

Sam Rogers is a decades-long veteran of the firm, but the brutal inhumanity of his work is finally catching up with him. We meet Rogers as the firm conducts a massive layoff. Distraught, Rogers wipes away tears — not for the newly unemployed, but for his dying dog. Rogers has been through job loss cycles before, and he rallies those left with jobs with a polished, well-honed speech. It's rote work for Rogers. Later, as Sullivan works into the night completing Dale's work, Rogers is at the vet, consoling his sick chocolate lab. Others are hard at work in the office, but Rogers is the only character seen actively tending to his personal life.

At the end of the film, understanding the human toll of the fire sale he just facilitated, Rogers storms the executive dining room to tell Tuld he wants out of the firm. Tuld diffuses Rogers' rage by telling him how lucky he is to be working at the firm and that it's better than digging ditches. Rogers retorts, "And if I had, at least there'd be some holes in the ground to show for it." Ironically, the final scene of "Margin Call" takes place during the night in the front yard of Rogers' ex-wife, Mary (Mary McDonnell). Rogers, in his rolled-up dress shirt, digs a grave for his dog, Ella. Rogers indeed digs his ditch, but all he has to show for it is grief, loss, and suffering.

The real-life inspirations behind Margin Call's fictional bank

"Margin Call" takes place at a fictional, unnamed investment bank, but it's definitely inspired by true events. The subprime mortgage crisis crescendoed in September 2008, when Lehman Brothers filed for the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, the same year the movie takes place. Writer and director J.C. Chandor, whose father worked on Wall Street, penned the script soon after Lehman Brothers' collapse. His story wasn't a specific indictment of one bank; rather, as he told The New York Times , the movie was meant to figure out "the decision-making process that got us into this mess."

The movie not only takes inspiration from Lehman Brothers but from some of its power players. There are parallels between former Lehman Brothers chief risk officer Madelyn Antoncic and "Margin Call's" Sarah Robertson. In an op-ed published by The New York Times , Antoncic wrote that she alerted leadership about their risk missteps but was dismissed. While Robertson says in the film that her warnings were expressed with "insufficient urgency," she acted in a manner similar to her real-life counterpart. But Robertson isn't the only character inspired by real people. John Tuld is a combination of former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain and Lehman Brothers head Dick Fuld. Fuld was pinpointed as a main instigator of the financial crisis, and it's safe to say that if the story of "Margin Call" had time to unfold, Tuld would have been considered in the same light.

What has the cast and crew of Margin Call said about the ending?

"Margin Call" boasts an all-star cast that was attracted to the film because it brought a human element to a very technical, and at times, hard-to-understand societal issue. Jeremy Irons said the film "clarifies what a lot of us sort of thought might have been happening, but didn't quite understand how it was happening and why it happened." He also said that when people finish "Margin Call," "They will understand how normal, pretty honest individuals got into this situation. How unregulated financial behavior [is something] we can't really have in society these days."

Other cast members have spoken about the film's ability to make complex financial issues simple for audiences to understand. Simon Baker said in an interview that the film "in essence explained those things, but more in layman's terms and put it on a more human, hierarchical system so I can look at is as a layman." He said, "The script doesn't delve too much into the vernacular of that world." Paul Bettany has commented on the moral ambiguity of "Margin Call," noting that the characters are not villains, rather they are merely acting on their capitalistic instincts that are aligned with the economic system in which they find themselves.

Margin Call's alternate ending

In an interview with ProPublica , writer and director J.C. Chandor shared that "Margin Call" could have had a very different ending from the final version. In 2009, financing the movie proved difficult, perhaps given its proximity to the crash itself. Chandor said money was available to produce the film but at a price: Chandor said he felt he could get financiers on board, but only if he provided them a Hollywood ending. Chandor said, "If Zachary Quinto's character had stood up and called in the SEC, and [Kevin] Spacey's character had been perp-walked out of the building à la [Oliver Stone's film "Wall Street"], I had a check to go make the movie. It was a very simple change at the end of the movie. It's often what happens with financiers that come on."

Chandor never said that he wrote this "alternate ending," nor did he suggest that such an ending was ever filmed. But it's clear that "Margin Call" could have been another typical Hollywood finance movie like "Wall Street" or "The Wolf of Wall Street" with an audience-pleasing ending, except Chandor stuck to his story. He shared, "I strongly, strongly felt that you did not get a systemic collapse where the tip of the sword of capitalism had to be socialized — which was of course what had just happened, where the government basically had to come in and take over the banking sector — you don't get that happening just on individual failure." Instead, the movie deliberately denies any one character hero status, choosing to examine the moral, ethical, and emotional dubiousness they face by working at the firm. Other films, like "The Big Short," have told stories about the financial crisis, but none have the unnerving ambiguity of "Margin Call."

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Critic’s Pick

‘Civil War’ Review: We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us. Again.

In Alex Garland’s tough new movie, a group of journalists led by Kirsten Dunst, as a photographer, travels a United States at war with itself.

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‘Civil War’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The writer and director alex garland narrates a sequence from his film..

“My name is Alex Garland and I’m the writer director of ‘Civil War’. So this particular clip is roughly around the halfway point of the movie and it’s these four journalists and they’re trying to get, in a very circuitous route, from New York to DC, and encountering various obstacles on the way. And this is one of those obstacles. What they find themselves stuck in is a battle between two snipers. And they are close to one of the snipers and the other sniper is somewhere unseen, but presumably in a large house that sits over a field and a hill. It’s a surrealist exchange and it’s surrounded by some very surrealist imagery, which is they’re, in broad daylight in broad sunshine, there’s no indication that we’re anywhere near winter in the filming. In fact, you can kind of tell it’s summer. But they’re surrounded by Christmas decorations. And in some ways, the Christmas decorations speak of a country, which is in disrepair, however silly it sounds. If you haven’t put away your Christmas decorations, clearly something isn’t going right.” “What’s going on?” “Someone in that house, they’re stuck. We’re stuck.” “And there’s a bit of imagery. It felt like it hit the right note. But the interesting thing about that imagery was that it was not production designed. We didn’t create it. We actually literally found it. We were driving along and we saw all of these Christmas decorations, basically exactly as they are in the film. They were about 100 yards away, just piled up by the side of the road. And it turned out, it was a guy who’d put on a winter wonderland festival. People had not dug his winter wonderland festival, and he’d gone bankrupt. And he had decided just to leave everything just strewn around on a farmer’s field, who was then absolutely furious. So in a way, there’s a loose parallel, which is the same implication that exists within the film exists within real life.” “You don’t understand a word I say. Yo. What’s over there in that house?” “Someone shooting.” “It’s to do with the fact that when things get extreme, the reasons why things got extreme no longer become relevant and the knife edge of the problem is all that really remains relevant. So it doesn’t actually matter, as it were, in this context, what side they’re fighting for or what the other person’s fighting for. It’s just reduced to a survival.”

By Manohla Dargis

A blunt, gut-twisting work of speculative fiction, “Civil War” opens with the United States at war with itself — literally, not just rhetorically. In Washington, D.C., the president is holed up in the White House; in a spookily depopulated New York, desperate people wait for water rations. It’s the near-future, and rooftop snipers, suicide bombers and wild-eyed randos are in the fight while an opposition faction with a two-star flag called the Western Forces, comprising Texas and California — as I said, this is speculative fiction — is leading the charge against what remains of the federal government. If you’re feeling triggered, you aren’t alone.

It’s mourning again in America, and it’s mesmerizingly, horribly gripping. Filled with bullets, consuming fires and terrific actors like Kirsten Dunst running for cover, the movie is a what-if nightmare stoked by memories of Jan. 6. As in what if the visions of some rioters had been realized, what if the nation was again broken by Civil War, what if the democratic experiment called America had come undone? If that sounds harrowing, you’re right. It’s one thing when a movie taps into childish fears with monsters under the bed; you’re eager to see what happens because you know how it will end (until the sequel). Adult fears are another matter.

In “Civil War,” the British filmmaker Alex Garland explores the unbearable if not the unthinkable, something he likes to do. A pop cultural savant, he made a splashy zeitgeist-ready debut with his 1996 best seller “The Beach,” a novel about a paradise that proves deadly, an evergreen metaphor for life and the basis for a silly film . That things in the world are not what they seem, and are often far worse, is a theme that Garland has continued pursuing in other dark fantasies, first as a screenwriter (“ 28 Days Later ”), and then as a writer-director (“ Ex Machina ”). His résumé is populated with zombies, clones and aliens, though reliably it is his outwardly ordinary characters you need to keep a closer watch on.

By the time “Civil War” opens, the fight has been raging for an undisclosed period yet long enough to have hollowed out cities and people’s faces alike. It’s unclear as to why the war started or who fired the first shot. Garland does scatter some hints; in one ugly scene, a militia type played by a jolting, scarily effective Jesse Plemons asks captives “what kind of American” they are. Yet whatever divisions preceded the conflict are left to your imagination, at least partly because Garland assumes you’ve been paying attention to recent events. Instead, he presents an outwardly and largely post-ideological landscape in which debates over policies, politics and American exceptionalism have been rendered moot by war.

‘Civil War’ Is Designed to Disturb You

A woman with a bulletproof vest that says “Press” stands in a smoky city street.

One thing that remains familiar amid these ruins is the movie’s old-fashioned faith in journalism. Dunst, who’s sensational, plays Lee, a war photographer who works for Reuters alongside her friend, a reporter, Joel (the charismatic Wagner Moura). They’re in New York when you meet them, milling through a crowd anxiously waiting for water rations next to a protected tanker. It’s a fraught scene; the restless crowd is edging into mob panic, and Lee, camera in hand, is on high alert. As Garland’s own camera and Joel skitter about, Lee carves a path through the chaos, as if she knows exactly where she needs to be — and then a bomb goes off. By the time it does, an aspiring photojournalist, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), is also in the mix.

The streamlined, insistently intimate story takes shape once Lee, Joel, Jessie and a veteran reporter, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), pile into a van and head to Washington. Joel and Lee are hoping to interview the president (Nick Offerman), and Sammy and Jessie are riding along largely so that Garland can make the trip more interesting. Sammy serves as a stabilizing force (Henderson fills the van with humanizing warmth), while Jessie plays the eager upstart Lee takes under her resentful wing. It’s a tidily balanced sampling that the actors, with Garland’s banter and via some cozy downtime, turn into flesh-and-blood personalities, people whose vulnerability feeds the escalating tension with each mile.

As the miles and hours pass, Garland adds diversions and hurdles, including a pair of playful colleagues, Tony and Bohai (Nelson Lee and Evan Lai), and some spooky dudes guarding a gas station. Garland shrewdly exploits the tense emptiness of the land, turning strangers into potential threats and pretty country roads into ominously ambiguous byways. Smartly, he also recurrently focuses on Lee’s face, a heartbreakingly hard mask that Dunst lets slip brilliantly. As the journey continues, Garland further sketches in the bigger picture — the dollar is near-worthless, the F.B.I. is gone — but for the most part, he focuses on his travelers and the engulfing violence, the smoke and the tracer fire that they often don’t notice until they do.

Despite some much-needed lulls (for you, for the narrative rhythm), “Civil War” is unremittingly brutal or at least it feels that way. Many contemporary thrillers are far more overtly gruesome than this one, partly because violence is one way unimaginative directors can put a distinctive spin on otherwise interchangeable material: Cue the artful fountains of arterial spray. Part of what makes the carnage here feel incessant and palpably realistic is that Garland, whose visual approach is generally unfussy, doesn’t embellish the violence, turning it into an ornament of his virtuosity. Instead, the violence is direct, at times shockingly casual and unsettling, so much so that its unpleasantness almost comes as a surprise.

If the violence feels more intense than in a typical genre shoot ’em up, it’s also because, I think, with “Civil War,” Garland has made the movie that’s long been workshopped in American political discourse and in mass culture, and which entered wider circulation on Jan. 6. The raw power of Garland’s vision unquestionably owes much to the vivid scenes that beamed across the world that day when rioters, some wearing T-shirts emblazoned with “ MAGA civil war ,” swarmed the Capitol. Even so, watching this movie, I also flashed on other times in which Americans have relitigated the Civil War directly and not, on the screen and in the streets.

Movies have played a role in that relitigation for more than a century, at times grotesquely. Two of the most famous films in history — D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist epic “The Birth of a Nation” (which became a Ku Klux Klan recruitment tool) and the romantic 1939 melodrama “Gone With the Wind” — are monuments to white supremacy and the myth of the Southern Lost Cause. Both were critical and popular hits. In the decades since, filmmakers have returned to the Civil War era to tell other stories in films like “Glory,” “Lincoln” and “Django Unchained” that in addressing the American past inevitably engage with its present.

There are no lofty or reassuring speeches in “Civil War,” and the movie doesn’t speak to the better angels of our nature the way so many films try to. Hollywood’s longstanding, deeply American imperative for happy endings maintains an iron grip on movies, even in ostensibly independent productions. There’s no such possibility for that in “Civil War.” The very premise of Garland’s movie means that — no matter what happens when or if Lee and the rest reach Washington — a happy ending is impossible, which makes this very tough going. Rarely have I seen a movie that made me so acutely uncomfortable or watched an actor’s face that, like Dunst’s, expressed a nation’s soul-sickness so vividly that it felt like an X-ray.

Civil War Rated R for war violence and mass death. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters.

An earlier version of this review misidentified an organization in the Civil War in the movie. It is the Western Forces, not the Western Front.

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Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times. More about Manohla Dargis

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‘Margin Call’ Movie Review

Zachary Quinto and Penn Badgley in Margin Call

I’ve been told there’s some sort of financial crisis in America. Apparently, huge investment firms, banks, Wall Street, and other pillars of the economic system were pushing the boundaries of speculation and greed and didn’t stop until the dam burst. I know, I know. I have to work on my analogies.

In any case, and tongue firmly in cheek, it’s no secret that times are tough for people. Whether or not things could have been averted or eased is a moot point now, the goal is finding a way to move forward. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t learn from our mistakes or analyze how events unfolded. In the film world, a few documentaries have taken a look at the economic meltdown (a la Inside Job , Collapse , Capitalism: A Love Story ) and it’s no surprise narrative films are also taking a stab at things; i.e., movies like Up in the Air , The Company Men , and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps .

Now add one more to the list with Margin Call . Written and directed by J.C. Chandor, the film explores a 48-hour period at a large investment firm as it discovers that the bubble is about to burst and how they decide to deal with the situation. The production boasts a star-studded cast including Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto , Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci, and Simon Baker. Despite its well-known players, this isn’t some over-financed excuse for actors to garner award consideration. The budget was modest, and the entire affair has the intimacy of an independent film or stage play.

This works for and against the overall result. Purposefully avoiding a specific time period (could be anytime from 2004 to 2009) and not proclaiming the company to be one of the infamous brokerage firms we’ve all come to regard with various levels of disdain, the focus is instead on the human drama. What drives people in the economic fast lane to act as they do? Is there room for scruples in such a cutthroat industry? If they saw the collapse coming, what was more important – creating financial stability for the betterment of the system or looking out for shareholders and themselves?

The story highlights different ethical and moral standards via the hierarchy within this fictitious company. At the top, we have Irons, whose only interest is sparing the company and its shareholders from financial ruin, even at the cost of national/global economic stability. Spacey, Bettany, and Moore are all high-level execs playing the game to win, covering their asses but with varying measures of caution regarding how their actions will affect the big picture. Then there’s Tucci and Quinto, who are the ones to discover the end is nigh and do what they can to warn those above them that the sky is indeed about to fall (not literally though, this isn’t a Roland Emmerich film).

For better or worse, the story plays out like a procedural, all very linearly and clinically. On the negative side, there’s a completely overstated and unnecessary metaphor concerning Spacey’s sick dog that is so over-the-top that it’s almost comical. Also, the film suffers from multiple-ending syndrome, and I had to recheck the credits to make sure Steven Spielberg didn’t lend a hand in that regard. To its benefit though, the issues being explored and the acting performances are all interesting enough to watch – even though the subject matter is so topical and possibly traumatic that audiences may have trouble mustering up the willpower to see the film in the first place.

The only other nitpicking I’ll do concerns the almost overly dramatic tone that Chandor attempts to hold throughout the film. It was so thick and obvious in its intent that the biggest surprise of the proceedings is that they didn’t get Philip Glass to do the score.

Still, if you count yourself among those intrigued at getting a glimpse of how companies could extend themselves so far, bringing us to the economic juncture we’re at right now, Margin Call decently hits the mark. It could have been tightened up quite a bit, ended about ten minutes earlier, and toned down some of the archetypal clichés, but it managed to slightly surpass my relatively low expectations. Hmm, not sure that the last line will make the DVD cover.

Margin Call hits theaters on October 21, 2011 and is rated R for language.

Margin Call

Distributor.

Roadside Attractions

Release Date

Oct 21, 2011

Release Notes

Official website.

www.margincallmovie.com

Movie night at Zuccotti Park!

Yes, the fine men and women dug in downtown need to get themselves a big screen, a projector, and a few thousand tubs of popcorn, because J. C. Chandor’s Margin Call is to Occupy Wall Street what The China Syndrome was to Three Mile Island: the fiction that will make it, here in Movie-Mad America, ever so much more real.

Beyond that, it’s a hell of a picture. And shrewd.

We the audience are not down below withor even, necessarily, on the side ofthe bankrupt, the downsized, the unshowered masses. We’re waaaay above the street in the offices of a mighty finance firm staring out at a sea of blue-lit high-rises. We’re perched over the shoulder of risk-management underling Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) as he scrutinizes a computer file passed on to him by his newly deep-sixed boss, Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), and then suddenly gets that same Oh my God look on his face as the guy in Deep Impact who realizes a planet-killing meteor is headed straight for Earth. Peter has just seen many of his colleagues coldly given their marching orders, so doom is in the air. But this new development is apocalyptic.

No, I can’t fully elucidate the nature of the onrushing disasterand one of the film’s few jokes is that the higher-ups can’t read the elaborate graphs either. But they all, to a person, know instantly what’s coming: complete economic conflagration. What spooks them is not the realization that their assets are toxic. It’s the imminent prospect of everyone else’s knowing. So Peter pulls his half-drunk boss, Will Emerson (Paul Bettany), out of a club, and then Will calls his boss, Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), who turns his car around and heads back to the firm, and we move with Peter (who, being a former rocket scientist, is brought along to explain the situation) up to each successive corporate levelor, depending on your perspective, down to each Dantean circle.

Every character is a subtler breed of predator than we’re used toor a more evolved Randian, or a more sanguine (and better-paid) moral accommodationist. Bettany’s drunken nihilist, with his weird (Irish?) accent, gives way to Spacey’s snappish company man, who escorts us to Simon Baker’s smug Jared Cohenthe most obviously repellent Master of the Universe, with no evident soul to loseand Demi Moore’s grim Sarah Robertson, with her faintly wizened face and short skirt, the lone female top executive, the one who passed up the chance to have a family and will be first in line for the chop. The helicopter setting down on the roof in the wee hours brings Jeremy Irons’s John (rhymes with Fuld) Tuld, more of a smiling killer than Boris Karloff in his heyday and far less accountable to a Higher Authority.

Margin Call is low-key, the histrionics dampened by the thick carpeting and double-paned glass, by the weight of keeping up appearances. The characters, lit from the side and bottom, get that gray, greasy, muzzy look of people who haven’t slept and whose hearts are racing too fast even to try. Apart from Quinto’s Sullivan, who comes from the world of pure science and retains a smidgen of ingenuousness, these are not likable figuresand yet however much we hate them, we are on their side. For one thing, there’s no one else around. For another, Chandor has structured Margin Call like a disaster movie, and we can’t help being fascinated by problem-solving, especially when it involves throwing around obscene amounts of money. Finally, we moviegoers have more fun when we identify with winners, no matter how unsavory. It’s a habit that has been more than a century in the making and will be difficult to shake. That’s why none of those Debbie Downer Iraq movies made a dime.

There is a moral centerof a sort. Spacey’s Sam Rogers begins the film in his office as many of his employees are fired, staring out the window, his eyes red from crying. But his tears are for his dying dog. Called to rouse his remaining forces, he emerges, stony as Dick Cheney, and tells them they’ve survived and have therefore won. But even this not-nice, philosophically complacent capitalist turns out to have a line he’s loath to cross: a fire sale of worthless assets dumped on unsuspecting customers, many of whom will go bust. How, he asks, can it make business sense when those people will never trust you again? Tuld says he’ll take care of that, and maybe he can: Goldman Sachs was caught betting against the very assets it was pitching to clientsand its executives are unbowed.

Spacey gives a major performance, his best in many years, as a near-dead soul groggily shaking off layers of insulation and beginning to feel again, and Quinto triumphs over not only a part with fewer and fewer lines but also the memories we have of him glowering at a computer screen in 24 . There is a special joy in seeing an old-style Joan Crawford ham like Demi Moore stop emoting and give the performance of her life, and in watching a pro like Tucci signal momentous emotion merely by gritting his teeth. Irons is a little sepulchral for my taste, but the way in which he drops the boom on Moore’s characteralmost tenderlyshows his own killer genius.

Just as fascinating as what’s onscreen will be Margin Call ’s reception. Hard-core Randians will babble about Austrian economics and Hollywood liberalismbut how much weight will their voices have in a world of such unchecked financial chicanery, a world in which Adam Smith would run screaming into the arms of Karl Marx? And no one will look at Irons’s Tuld and sayas they said of Wall Street’s Gordon GekkoI want to be that guy! I’d sooner pitch a tent in Zuccotti Park. — David Edelstein

Featured In

Zachary Quinto on His Latest Film, Margin Call’ (10/24/11)

Margin Call

Boardroom thriller following the employees of a large New York investment bank over the opening 24 hours of the 2008 financial crisis. All-star cast includes Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore, Paul Bettany.

"When entry-level analyst Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) unlocks information that could prove to be the downfall of the firm, a roller-coaster ride ensues as decisions both financial and moral catapult the lives of all involved to the brink of disaster... an examination of the human components of a subject too often relegated to partisan issues of black and white. A portrayal of the financial industry and its denizens as they confront the decisions that shape our global future." (Sundance Film Festival 2011)

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Margin Call | Ratings & Reviews

Rotten tomatoes® rating, audience score rating.

"J.C. Chandor's precocious writing-directing debut is fastidious, smart and more than a bit portentous as it probes the human costs of unchecked greed."

"Steering clear of overt condemnation or adulation of morally dubious characters, this is sophisticated cinema that respects the audience’s ability to follow complex subject matter."

"Escalation is the main thing Margin Call has going for it, as more substantial actors are trotted out to have their way with Chandor's realistic-sounding boardroom dialogue."

"Margin Call is smart, but too cool and solemn to raise anyone's temperature. Nonetheless, writer/director J. C. Chandor should count himself the luckiest man in show business this weekend. How many first-time feature filmmakers can truthfully claim that their movie collided right up against the zeitgeist?"

"The accomplishment of this movie is that it allows you to sympathize with them, to acknowledge the reality of their predicament, without letting them off the hook or forgetting the damage they did."

"Spacey is watchable as the veteran trading boss, in a state of near-breakdown, who discovers all too late that he has a kind of conscience."

"Margin Call is an explosive drama that speaks lucidly and scarily to the times we live in."

"The first-rate cast cannot be faulted. Chandor has assembled an extraordinary ensemble."

"Chock-full of terrific performances, Margin Call is the kind of gripping, grown-up film that these days is usually found on the small screen."

"If nothing else, Margin Call serves as a rebuke to "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" emphatic style - which ultimately glamorizes the profession it means to shame - and brings this dangerous numbers game back to the trading-floor desktops and mahogany-covered conference tables where it belongs. It isn't sexy, but the stakes feel much higher."

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IMAGES

‘Margin Call,’ With Zachary Quinto
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Margin Call movie review & film summary (2011)
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VIDEO

Who is Real JOHN TULD from Margin Call, Explained

COMMENTS

'Margin Call,' With Zachary Quinto
Directed by J.C. Chandor. Drama, Thriller. R. 1h 47m. By A.O. Scott. Oct. 20, 2011. There have been reports of hurt feelings among the bankers and brokers who have been the focus of public ire and ...
The Unjustly Neglected "Margin Call"
The movie did get a screenplay nomination, but it had the ingredients for more: A timely subject, excellent reviews, a pedigreed cast (Jeremy Irons, Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore, etc.), a theme that should have resonated in liberal Hollywood, and a labor-of-love backstory for its writer-director, J.C. Chandor. It even came out during the autumn ...
The Enthusiast: 'Margin Call'
Walter Thomson/Roadside Attractions Jeremy Irons in "Margin Call.". This week's Enthusiast comes from Chris Pavone, author of the new novel " The Expats ," a thriller about an American couple living in Luxembourg. I love this line of dialogue from "Margin Call," as delivered by Jeremy Irons: "Please, speak as you might to a ...
Margin Call movie review & film summary (2011)
Written and directed by. J.C. Chandor. It may have happened something like this. "Margin Call" depicts the last night of good times on Wall Street, as a deadly certainty travels up the executive ladder at an investment firm: Disastrous speculation in the mortgage markets is leading to the firm's collapse. We can still recall those days in the ...
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Dec. 10, 2015. A true crime story and a madcap comedy, a heist movie and a scalding polemic, " The Big Short " will affirm your deepest cynicism about Wall Street while simultaneously ...
'Margin Call': A Movie Occupied With Wall Street : NPR
Now, Margin Call seems anything but marginal. The movie opens with a chilling vision: Layoff specialists march into a mighty New York financial firm and give various employees the bad news ...
David Edelstein on 'Margin Call' and 'Martha ...
Movie night at Zuccotti Park! Yes, the fine men and women dug in downtown need to get themselves a big screen, a projector, and a few thousand tubs of popcorn, because J. C. Chandor's Margin ...
Margin Call and the financial thriller
Margin Call, the latest in a line of films on the crash of 2008, depicts a Wall Street investment bank's last ditch attempts to save itself from impending disaster. Written and directed by first ...
Margin Call
Movie Info. When an analyst uncovers information that could ruin them all, the key players (Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany) at an investment firm take extreme measures to control the damage. Rating: R ...
'Margin Call' is a timely Wall Street thriller
"Margin Call," an excellent Wall Street thriller directed by J.C. Chandor and starring Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons and Zachary Quinto, is a remarkably timely story about a firm...
Margin Call
Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 20, 2020. You can tell a story out of anything, and you can tell a story about anybody, but the more technical the story gets and the more unsympathetic ...
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Margin Call Review. 2008. Fired from his job, risk management executive Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) hands a flash drive to up and coming analyst Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto). Staying late to ...
Margin Call
Margin Call is an explosive drama that speaks lucidly and scarily to the times we live in. As Tuld says, "There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat."
Margin Call
Generally Favorable Based on 38 Critic Reviews. 76. 84% Positive 32 Reviews. 13% Mixed 5 Reviews. 3% Negative 1 Review. All Reviews; Positive Reviews; ... New York Post Oct 21, 2011 ... Margin Call is a movie that I thought was alright. I do think the movie is well acted and nicely written, but to me the movie is a slow burn and I just don't ...
MARGIN CALL Review
Matt reviews J.C. Chandor's Margin Call starring Kevin Spacey, Zachary Quinto, Paul Bettany, Stanley Tucci, and Jeremy Irons. The 2008 economic collapse is one of the major events of our lifetimes ...
Margin Call
Margin Call is a 2011 American drama film written and directed by J. C. Chandor in his feature directorial debut. The principal story takes place over a 24-hour period at a large Wall Street investment bank during the initial stages of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. It focuses on the actions taken by a group of employees during the subsequent financial collapse.
'Margin Call': A movie for the Occupy Wall Street movement?
Fast-forward two years and 'Margin Call,' which opens Oct. 21 and stars Quinto, Penn Badgley, Kevin Spacey and Paul Bettany as investment bank workers on the eve of the crisis, is starting to ...
Margin Call: A Realistic Wall Street Movie
New York Times film critic A.O. Scott gave the small-budget film with a big-name cast — Demi Moore, Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, Paul Bettany and Simon Baker -- a rave review ...
The Ending Of Margin Call Explained
By Holly Roberts / May 20, 2023 11:15 pm EST. The 2011 financial thriller "Margin Call" explores the origins of the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis. Caused in large part by the boom-and-bust of ...
'Civil War' Review: We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us. Again
Rarely have I seen a movie that made me so acutely uncomfortable or watched an actor's face that, like Dunst's, expressed a nation's soul-sickness so vividly that it felt like an X-ray ...
Movie Review: Margin Call (2011)
Review of Margin Call, the dramatic movie starring Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci and Simon Baker.
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Read the review and get showtimes for this film..
Margin Call
Big on Streaming. How to watch online, stream, rent or buy Margin Call in New Zealand + release dates, reviews and trailers. Boardroom thriller following the employees of a large New York investment bank over the opening 24 hours of the 2008 financial crisis.

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