Margin Call has neither. The ensemble cast, though fantastically talented, are used to modest effect. Neither of the whistleblowers, Eric and Peter, has enough screentime to carry the film as a hero.
Kevin Spacey's character, trading-floor boss Sam Rogers, almost gets to be heroic, but spends much of the film moping about his chocolate labrador no, not a golden retriever , which is slowly dying of incurable cancer. It's best not to look too closely at this storyline in case the labrador turns out to be less the faithful hound, more a clunky metaphor for capitalism. Again, it is realistic that everyone in the film is slightly hopeless rather than being a fully-fledged hero or villain — but people being slightly hopeless isn't that thrilling to watch.
This is what the Occupy Wall Street protesters are angry about: They are not against capitalism, but about Wall Street dishonesty and greed. They also can reflect the enormity of what is happening: Their company and their lives are being rendered meaningless. This scenario was enacted at many Wall Street institutions on the autumn of , and fundamental financial reform is still being opposed.
No particular firm is named, but doesn't it seem to you that the name of the Jeremy Irons character, "John Tuld," has an echo of Richard Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, who collected enormous bonuses for leading his company into bankruptcy? Irons is sly in the role, a man who knows his own financial stability is unassailable, who considers his job as an amoral exercise, who has made it to the top by not particularly caring about people.
A great corporate executive must have a strain of ruthlessness. I also admired Kevin Spacey, who projects incisive intelligence in his very manner, and Demi Moore , as a senior executive who has risen to just below the glass ceiling and knows she will stay there. The physical world of the film itself is effective. It's all glass, steel and protocol, long black cars and executive perks, luxurious lifestyles paid for with what was inescapably fraud. One of the characters has a sick dog.
The dog is the only creature in the entire film that anyone likes. Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. We have updated our Terms of Use. Please read our new Privacy Statement before continuing. Imagine if Merrill Lynch had been smarter, like Goldman Sachs, a few years ago. Those clients might have then landed in trouble. But Merrill would have avoided a fire sale to Bank of America.
The plot is simple. Indeed, for anyone with a modicum of understanding of financial business it is downright simplistic. The Dodd-Frank financial reform law was passed only over the objections of major banks, who are now advocating that large parts of it be repealed. The fact is bankers are astute to the flaws of Dodd-Frank. Many economists question whether some of its more controversial regulations will actually reduce systemic risk, or rather just create needless red tape and encourage risk to shift to other even more dangerously unregulated sectors of finance like hedge funds.
Also, its stringent measures will not apply to foreign banks, thus putting U. By contrast, economists were in near unanimous agreement that Basel III would reduce international systemic risk. Generally speaking, the best kind of reforms are those that avoid trying to predetermine exactly what kinds of financial transactions or activities should or should not be allowed, but instead seek to better align individual incentives with the collective interest—essentially to reward bankers for regulating themselves.
Requiring individual pay to be more strongly linked to long-term investment returns and firm performance would be one step in the right direction, but even that strategy poses problems.
Every new set of rules has limits and creates an incentive to skirt them or offload risk to overlooked areas. And this is the ultimate—and ultimately unsatisfying—conclusion of Margin Call : that there may be no true and final fix for the problem; that, to a large extent, it may be simply unavoidable that bubbles will build and burst, and that financial crises will continue to happen in any economy that resembles free market capitalism, for the instincts and behaviors that cause them are so basic to human nature.
The message is clear: This has happened before, it will happen again. Human nature does not change. The real question to take away from the movie is not whether we should reform our financial and economic system to prevent another crisis.
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