Margin Call (2011)

Ah, nothing like watching the complete fall of our economy play out on the screen. And due to the fact that I don’t pay attention to the news, or the economy, all I know is that stocks have those line graphs, which are one of the five things I know in algebra, and that is all I know about the economy. Come on, I sit around and watch movies and TV all day. Seriously, I watched one season of How I Met Your Mother in about a week. I have won the award. Either way, Margin Call follows a stock investment company in 2008, who, when they start to have major layoffs, get people wondering about their future at this pristine and well-paying company. One of the people who is specifically worried is Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), who is working on finishing an equation that might show that their entire company is heading for the toilet. On his way out, he gives his unfinished equation to one of his more favored co-workers, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto, who is also the main backing behind this film getting made), who that night finishes his equation, and finds out a bunch of fancy financial stuff I don’t know about, but basically, it means that the stock market is about to crash that night or a few nights in the future. As we all know, it did. Either way, after calling the entire team back to work, Peter spends the next 24 hours with co-workers Seth (Penn Badgley), Will (Paul Bettany), and his boss Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), among others (Demi Moore, Jeremy Irons, Simon Baker, Mary McDowell, again, among others), trying to prevent the crisis they’ve been told about. And what I want to focus on here for a little bit is what different movie this could have been. A lesser movie would have been about this sudden crash, and how this company tried to save themselves. But this amazing film, which surprisingly, is made by a first-time director who just announced his second film, which I will go see, isn’t about how people reacted to a crisis. This is a movie about how people see that their world is coming to an end, and how they plan to live their last days. In that way, this film is very much like the new Lars Von Trier film Melancholia, which I am dying to see, but it is actually about the world coming to an end. But it’s not 2012, it’s a movie about how people react on those final hours, and that is what makes Margin Call such a great film. The script in unnaturally tight, the dialogue ripped from the notebook of the great Aaron Sorkin, and the direction cramped, claustrophobic, and atmospheric. The only reason that this movie is not going to end up on my ‘Best of 2011’ list is that we are having an amazing year for movies. If this was released last year, not only would it peak on people’s ‘Best of 2010’ lists, but it might score a few Oscar nods.
8.5/10