Margin Call .. Film Review

Margin Call .. Review 

Margin Call is the best imaginary behaviour of the present financial crisis. It's altogether larger to Oliver Stone's hollow Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and in the same class as Charles Ferguson's revealing, piercingly intelligent documentary Inside Job. In fact, it stands up to comparison with the 1992 film of David Mamet's superbly dirty play Glengarry Glen Ross, which in many ways it look like, not least in containing a peerless ensemble cast that includes Kevin Spacey. Glengarry Glen Ross takes place during a couple of days in a seedy provincial branch of a national company where anxious salesmen peddle worthless real estate. Margin Call, also set over some 36 hours or so, initially appears to be located in an altogether more honourable and affluent place, the Manhattan headquarters of a respected investment bank. But the year is 2008, the sub-prime crisis is under way and except for their Hugo Boss and Armani suits and the stainless steel and plate glass skyscraper they work in, there's little to differentiate the flat workers making $1m trimmings on Wall Street from the grifters in Glengarry Glen Ross.

To turn shareholders’ wants into a drive is to be mortified of a rational confusion.  Like eating food to survive because food is necessary condition of life. But if we lived mainly to eat, making food a sole purpose of life, we would become gross. The purpose of business is not to make a profit; it’s to make profit so that the business can grow and do better in future.

The movie is as fascinating and button-holing as a first-rate thriller and starts with the company's newest round of brutal firings. One of the victims, veteran risk analyst Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), hands over a file on which he's working to new employee Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), a 29-year-old former rocket scientist now doing much the same job for a rather larger salary at the bank. What Sullivan finds in the file is a forecast of the company's future that makes a twig of explode look like a two-penny firecracker. The company has been buying and passing on worthless packages of mortgages, and it is on the brink of the biggest bank collapse of all time. As night falls, word passes up through the hierarchy from Sullivan to his slick British superior Will Emerson (Paul Bettany) and on to the head of sales Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), a basically decent middle-aged man whose main current problem is that his much-loved dog is dying of cancer. Rogers’s dailies back to the office to consult his boss, the cool ruthless 43-year-old Jared Cohen (Simon Baker). Not surprisingly they call in the almost God-like CEO, John Tuld (Jeremy Irons), who reaches by helicopter at midnight. His name is not entirely unlike to that of Richard Fuld, the infamous CEO of Lehman Brothers, one of the chief targets of Ferguson's Inside Job.

At this point the grey areas get darker, the ironic understatements become covered with free-floating obscenities, scapegoats find themselves risked out, the rich protect their backs and get richer, and the public gets screwed. Chandor's language is as exact and undoubted as Mamet’s; the realism never slips into cheap cynicism and, as Jean Renoir says in La Règle du jeu: "The awful thing is this. Everyone has his reasons."

The film showed the main problems of financial crisis which is happening now a days in the business industry. It also gives the opportunity to tackle the root of the main problems that cause current financial crisis. There is a lesson to learn after watching the film about how to handle businesses. Its keeps an audience thinking and assuming their own opinion about what is going to happen next. Apparently this is not the only reason of economic crisis; there are other reasons such as lack of strategy and lack of corporate governance.