Movies…with a little bit of obscure culture and sports mixed in
“Follows the key people at an investment bank over a 24-hour period during the early stages of the 2008 financial crisis.” Director: J.C. ChandorWriter: J.C. ChandorStaring: Zachary Quinto, Stanley Tucci, […]
“Follows the key people at an investment bank over a 24-hour period during the early stages of the 2008 financial crisis.”
Director: J.C. Chandor
Writer: J.C. Chandor
Staring: Zachary Quinto, Stanley Tucci, Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Penn Badgley, Simon Baker, Demi Moore
Rated: R
Release Date: September 29, 2011
IMDB
“Follows the key people at an investment bank over a 24-hour period during the early stages of the 2008 financial crisis.”
Director: J.C. Chandor
Writer: J.C. Chandor
Staring: Zachary Quinto, Stanley Tucci, Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Penn Badgley, Simon Baker, Demi Moore
Rated: R
Release Date: September 29, 2011
IMDB
Tense. Very Tense. Margin Call (2011) does not let you breath. The story takes place all within less than two days, and by the end your brain is both exhausted and accelerating due to exhaustion. Margin Call is written with surreal realism; the communication style between all the employees of the trading firm is brutish and shorter than concise. The story throws you into the deep end of a very complicated world and lets you decide if you want to sink or swim.
Margin Call tells the story of a stock trading firm on the bring of the 2008 financial collapse. Early signs of a long business day starts when numerous workers get laid off, including senior trader Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci). Before he leaves with all of his goods, Dale gives Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) a drive with some work he had yet to finish. Sullivan discovers, and confirms with his friend Seth Bregnan (Penn Ladgley), that the company they are working for is in deep, DEEP, trouble. The two young traders bring it to their new supervisor Will Emmerson (Paul Bettany), and he immediately sees the brown hurricane of shit that his Seth and Peter handed him.
We continue to climb the bureaucracy ladder and we meet Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey). This mad admits he gets paid a lot to do very little, but when he understands what his new direct reportee is telling him, he then jumps up a few floors to talk with Jared Cohen (Simon Baker). This young thinker is put in a major ethical thunder dome; and let’s not say he listened totally to his empathetic conscience. Cohen knows what the firm must do, but he can not do it without the go ahead from the only one who can. The head honcho. The big guy. John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) enters the board room, flanked by a couple of assistants, one of which is played by Demi Moore.
This is where Margin Call flips on its head.
The boardroom scene is the most rewatchable scene for the grim end of the movie, and it sets the perfect stage for the best performance of the movie. Jeremy Irons is unrivaled once he enters the screen, and I am not referring to his character’s status within the company. Irons’ s portrayal of the throne sitting John Tuld is Shakespearean. It is as if Tuld is a king talking down to his serfs. One can simply not get enough of it.
As Margin Call plays out, all the shit discovered at the start only snowballs and hits every fan possible. The script lets the furious past-paced world spin out of control in the best way possible. Fantastic performances across the board make this movie propel forward like some of Aaron Sorkin’s best work.
Writer and director J.C. Chandor is a pretty damn talented man. Margin Call was his first major motion picture, and he followed that up with Robert Redford’s swan song, All Is Lost (2013)i. A year later he helmed A Most Violent Year (2014), which is criminally underrated. Then, after a five year hiatus, he comes back with the Netflix action cast mega-bomb Triple Frontier (2019), which is directly up my personal alley.
Chandor has worked with a ton of very talented and top-tier talents in his young career: Bettany, Quinto, Spacey, Strong, Tucci, Moore, Redford, Oscar Isaac, Jessica Chastain, Ben Affleck, Charlie Hunnam, and Pedro Mascal. That is not a bad bunch of actors. and his next movie Kraven The Hunter (2023) boasts the names of Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Russell Crowe. I am not a Marvel guy anymore, but I am becoming a Chandor guy.
Margin Call was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 2012 Academy Awards. It lost out to Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris (2011). Also nominated were Bridesmaids (2011), The Artist (2011) and A Separation (2011). For my money, I would have awarded it to Margin Call, but I have not seen The Artist and I have never heard of A Separation.
STANKO RATING: A (4.0/5 Stars)
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