In the Financial Meltdown, Who Made the `Margin Call'?

This week, Kevin Spacey and Stanley Tucci lead an all-star cast (including Demi Moore, Simon Baker, Paul Bettany, and Jeremy Irons, plus rising Star Trek newcomer Zachary Quinto) in the latest cinema exploration of The Day The Money Died, Margin Call.

Set over the course of a single day (clearly sometime between June and September of 2008), Margin Call is a The Queen-like "reimagining" of what might have gone on the day Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns collapsed, from within the locked-down walls of the company itself.

The other highest-profile financial-meltdown movies, Oliver Stone's Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps and HBO's Too Big to Fail were all flash, infusing almost every frame with grand, almost Shakespearean "epic-ness", plus Sorkin-esque rapid-fire dialog and frantically paced action.  They wanted to tell the whole "macro" story of the 2008 collapse in broad strokes and grand scenes.

In contrast, writer/director J.C. Chandor largely locks us into the top-floor board room that's now become a war room, in the deserted midnight high rise that now overlooks the destiny of American finance. The movie is shot in the same ice-water cold, wintry bleached tones one might remember from a '70s paranoia thriller like Three Days of the Condor or All the President's Men, or a low-budget, light horror indie, with a slasher movie's ever-increasing sense of dread.

The day starts badly, with a brutal downsizing of the company's "risk management" department, including its senior supervisor (Stanley Tucci), who's in the midst of preparing a report about some "irregularities" on the company's balance sheets.  (His firing is a straight homage to Jason Reitman's wonderful em>Up in the Air<, complete with business-buzzword speaking lady executives and campy "career transition" packets.)

Tucci's character himself is a blatant metaphor for the real-life Cassandras (such as Bill Clinton's chief regulator Brooksley Born and George W. Bush's Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill) who saw what was coming -- and were summarily kicked to the curb because of it.  His newly-eviscerated department also mirrors the willfully lax accountability and oversight that characterized the late '90s and '00s financial world.  Nothing can be allowed to upset "market confidence" or distract from the all-important "narrative" that Things Just Get Better All The Time -- least of all in the "crisis management" department!

But Tucci's already turned over some of his findings to a young protege (Zachary Quinto), who's a real rocket scientist -- literally.  (He moved away from engineering new technologies to high finance because "the pay was considerably better", just as Tucci himself now regrets having abandoned civil engineering to put his mathematical formulas and algebraic equations to use in the service of mortgage-backed securities.)  Quinto downloads the files that Tucci secretly passed him about their asset/balance sheets, and sees that the company, despite maintaining an illusion of health, is literally hemorrhaging red ink, thanks to the first signs of decline as the real-estate bubble starts to deflate.

With the firm already leveraged to the hilt, they've already passed the point of insolvency and bankruptcy. And if house prices were to decline 25% from their peak over the next year or two (which already happened in real life during the last big slowdown -- the early '90s recession in southern California or late 1980s Texas, for example), the company will be in The Producers territory, owing 100% of values to multiple investors.  The party's over.

Now the big guns descend on the firm, literally like locusts (ferried to the top of the building in their executive helicopters), for a long day's journey into morning, a morning that will see a brutal wake-up call for the world economy.  These designer-clad sharks and cobras -- played by Spacey, Moore, Baker, and uber-boss CEO Irons -- now have only one decision left to make.  (Irons' character is named "John Tuld" -- as close to "Dick Fuld" as you can get without being criminally libelous or committing plagiarism.)

Like a company debating whether or not to dump a gusher of steaming, hazardous waste into a pristine lake, while everyone else tries to kid themselves, the cold-bloodedly logical Irons knows that when a ship as big as their firm sinks, a domino-effect panic and Wall Street meltdown will be all but inevitable anyway, one way or the other.  The only question is, do we take our medicine along with the rest of the suckers, or are we the first ones to jump off the Titanic and save at least part of our shirts, by knowingly misrepresenting the value of the stocks in a marathon sell-off, until the jig is up?

While the established stars have the showoff roles, perhaps the heart of Margin Call beats in Gossip Girl stud Penn Badgley's chest, thanks to his brilliant, lizardly-yet-sympathetic performance as Quinto's company sidekick and best friend.  Just 24 hours ago, he was breathing a sigh of relief that he'd survived the initial downsizing, was on the fast-track to success, partying and cruising and doing cocaine, a king of the world.

Now his firm is going down, and as 23-year-old startup-man on the totem pole, Baker and Irons are going to dispatch him with extreme prejudice -- and he knows it. "All I wanted was to do this!" he begs, breaking down in the men's room, as Baker's casually cruel ice-king continues shaving without even cutting himself.

Of course, we live in a world jam-packed with people who "just wanted" to work at all sorts of once-viable careers and businesses -- but they can't anymore, because the ground's shifted beneath their feet.  And Baker's dispassionate shrugging off perfectly mirrors our current political system's response to these people's plight (which seems basically to be, "Well, sucks to be you...")

"Look at them," Badgley sighs earlier, indicating at the break-dawn traffic, as he and Bettany drive outside the office on a mission to bring Tucci back before the news gets out. "They have no idea what's going to happen to them today."  Spacey even allows his own son, who has investments in the company, to take a brutal loss, albeit he apparently let him know before he lost everything. (How very kind of him.)

In perhaps the film's key scene, Baker exhales that he feels like he's fallen into a bad dream.  "That's funny," Spacey replies mordantly.  "I feel like we've just woken up."

In a previous article of mine, one of my commentors wondered, "What kind of economic Kool-Aid were we drinking?" to think that the across-the-board, postwar prosperity that ran from Truman and Ike until Ford and Carter -- which most Americans still regard as the benchmark of "normal" -- could've been sustained indefinitely? Even in spite of massive global/geopolitical and technological change?

So instead of dealing with these inconvenient truths and paradigm shifts, we spent the last 15 years papering them over.  And the movie makes it crystal clear that these Wally Wall Streets realized that's exactly what they were doing with their careers -- and even told themselves that there was maybe a sort of "nobility" to it.  A dot-com bubble here, a real-estate boom there, a fresh coat of surpluses and a new lawn of tax cuts, and presto!  The dilapidated old fixer-upper with the leaky plumbing and termitey roof could still pass for new.

Until September of 2008, that is, when the place finally collapsed on itself.  But even in (or because of) disaster, as Irons notes -- for some, there's money still to be made.

Ultimately, like a David Mamet or Edward Albee stageplay, with its heightened drama in claustrophobic surroundings, Margin Call asks the morality-play question:  Would you do the "right" thing?  Especially if you knew that the economy was probably about to collapse anyway, and it'd just be a matter of degree?  Or would you take the $2 million bonuses and golden parachutes and dump the toxic assets, knowing full well you were lying to people whose lives you would ruin -- but at least you'd have protected your family and your otherwise very precarious future?

Unlike the grand opera (if not opera buffo) stylings of Too Big to Fail and Money Never Sleeps, Margin Call brings things down to your level -- whether you want it to or not.  What would YOU do, if you were in these Masters of the Universe's designer shoes?