Margin Call

"There are three ways to make a living in this business. Be first, be smarter, or cheat." Margin Call is the latest instalment in a growing body of films to cast light on the motives, doubts, and fears leading to the 2008 financial crisis. Thankfully, the addition is entirely welcome. Director and screenwriter J. C. Chandor’s first feature serves up a boldly authentic account of the events which simultaneously manages to humanise its protagonists and expose some of the more sinister machinations of the institution they serve.

The film follows several key players in an unnamed investment firm over a 24-hour period in the early stages of the financial crisis. When an analyst discovers a glitch in the company’s financial records, the central protagonists are thrown into a mire of financial and moral soul-searching. Their responses display a wide spectrum of personalities and Chandor succeeds in subtly teasing out their differences. We are offered hopeless bystanders, idealists, down-to-earth pragmatists, and, of course, the stubborn all-powerful CEO, played with characteristic self-assurance by Jeremy Irons.

The result is a film which works both as a compelling thriller and subtle drama. While it lacks the cutting edge of Inside Job, it succeeds in delivering a critical engagement with the financial crisis, eschewing the pious platitudes that often characterise the ‘high-finance’ genre (i.e. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps). In one memorable scene CEO John Tuld waxes lyrical about money’s power as "make-believe" to his colleague Sam Rogers (played by Kevin Spacey) and then proceeds to list 16 financial crises in the West dating from 1637. His message is a grim one: ‘It's all just the same thing over and over; we can't help ourselves. And you and I can't control it, or stop it, or even slow it.’

Perhaps, then, the best lesson we can learn from Margin Call is that, despite the inevitable importance of re-enacting history in such fictional dramas, we remain inevitably doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Thus the final paradox is that the only thing we can learn from history is that we will never learn from history.