It probably won't win Best Picture, since it's fundamentally about business, instead of a disability, or an historical event, or a disability during an historical event. (The King's Speech was perfectly designed to win that Oscar.)
But it probably should win Best Picture. It's the movie The Social Network was trying to be: a socially relevant exploration of the most impactful phenomenon of our time.
Maybe the problem with The Social Network was that Facebook, despite being really cool and really useful, is simply not the most impactful phenomenon of our time. The 2008 recession is. And that's what Margin Call explores.
Sort of.
By conscious intent, the year is never mentioned, nor is the investment firm at the center of the story ever named. In this way, the movie transcends the current moment. It's not just about the 2008 recession, it's about the 1928 crash, it's about the Panic of 1835, it's about every bust in the history of the boom-and-bust cycle.
And it's about how people handle that transition from boom to bust.
The genius breakthrough of the story -- written and directed by first-timer J.C. Chandor on a very low budget with a bevy of stars working for essentially no pay -- is that the action takes place in a mere twenty-four hours.
Those twenty-four hours begin with a round of layoffs at a major Manhattan firm. The people getting laid off are risk-management executives. Who needs them anyway? One of them is Stanley Tucci, who has been nibbling around the edges of a troubling development in the company's overall portfolio projections.
Before leaving the building, Tucci passes his work via flashdrive to a subordinate who survived the culling, Zachary Quinto, with the admonition to "be careful." This warning sets Quinto's mind spinning. He stays late at work that night, plotting out the ramifications of the projections Tucci had examined, and he comes to a startling conclusion: the global economy is about to crater. And no one knows it yet.
He jumps on the phone to his even-younger colleague Penn Badgely, who is at a nightclub with their new uber-boss Paul Bettany. At Quinto's urgent request, Bettany and Badgely return to the office. Bettany takes one look at Quinto's projections, puts down his bottle of champagne and calls his own boss, Kevin Spacey. It's after midnight now, and Spacey is mourning the death of his beloved dog, but Bettany convinces him to drive all the way back into the city.
Spacey's not happy to do this, but as soon as he sees Quinto's projections, he calls his OWN boss, played by the Mentalist himself, Simon Baker. The Mentalist is a cold, ruthless blue-eyed killer who convenes an immediate conference with all our known players, plus Demi Moore. His primary goal is to determine if Quinto's projections have merit. Once he's satisfied that they do -- he gives Moore forty-five minutes to crunch the numbers -- he calls in HIS boss, a friendly, charming, thoroughly terrifying corporate titan played by Jeremy Irons.
This is called escalating action, and it makes the middle act of Margin Call an awful lot of fun.
Once the entire upper echelon of the investment firm -- plus underlings Quinto and Badgely -- are on the eightieth floor of the darkened skyscraper at two in the morning, an earnest, smart, high-stakes discussion unfolds over what the firm's proper course of action now is.
Brilliantly, the film handles complicated economic concepts without ever delving into jargon -- except for one brief speech from Quinto, which Irons confesses to not understanding. Likewise, it broaches major philosophical questions of the modern world, such as the moral responsibilities of a massive international corporation to the economic environment in which it thrives, and it does so without demonizing or exculpating anyone.
Every character in Margin Call has a different perspective on what is going down, a different view of what it means, and a different idea of what must be done now.
In the end, they all come together to sell a hell of a lot of worthless stock derivatives before everyone else figures out what's happening.
In interviews, auteur Chandor has said he conceived the original idea in 2006, two years before the recession happened. His inspiration was a real estate deal he was involved in. A friend with a godfather in high finance suddenly warned him to sell his stake in the deal.
Chandor wondered what that guy in high finance knew, and he wondered what it felt like to walk around with information no one else had.
"What if" questions like these are often fruitful, and the timing of this one gave Chandor a serious head start over competitors who might also have liked to write a smart script about the onset of the recession. Since it takes roughly five years for a script that's going to get good to get good (most scripts won't be good even after a million years of revision; sadly, you never know which is which till you invest your five years), the earliest we should be seeing good movies about the recession is 2013. And that's the very earliest. But Chandor had his head start and he took full advantage. Good for him.
My only real question about Margin Call is whether the movie will age well. I'm curious if it's still engaging in twenty years, when we're in the midst of the Great Boom of the 2030's.
Because I'm already convinced it's a great film now.
SCORE
How Accomplished: 92/100
How Much I Enjoyed: 93/100
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