Both on and off-screen, Wall Street has long served as an allegory for the meteoric glories and extreme excesses that characterize American capitalism. While the financial community has certainly been rocked in recent years over the actions taken in the period preceding the economic meltdown, few accounts of what it was like inside the firms on the brink of collapse have emerged. A tense picture of the beginning of the end of modern-day Wall Street hedonism as we know it, MARGIN CALL is a fictionalized account of an investment firm on the dawn of financial collapse. The pre-recession climate in which MARGIN CALL is initially situated, in which institutions like Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs inspired investor confidence and trust instead of skepticism and wariness, seems oddly innocent in today’s slowly- recovering financial market.
Unlike other Wall Street films depicting the glamorous extracurricular lives that investment banking salaries can buy, MARGIN CALL takes place almost exclusively in the fictional firm’s office over a twenty-four-hour period. Moving the focus from a clear-cut tale of morality versus immorality towards a more nuanced version of events, the film provides insight into the various levels of decision-making rarely seen in the world of high-level finance.
The film, which premiered at Sundance this past January and went on to be nominated for the Golden Bear the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, marks writer/director J.C. Chandor’s feature film directorial debut. Having cut his teeth working on documentaries and commercials in the fifteen years preceding MARGIN CALL, Chandor wrote the film over a period of just four days following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. In an interview with Movieline last fall, Chandor explained his aim was to tell as timeless a story as possible, stripping away dates, times, and specific signifying details. “I always found it sort of interesting that, by the actual content in the movie, this could have taken place in 2006, or 2004, even,” says Chandor. “People were calling the end for many years.”
While the timing of MARGIN CALL’s release comes at the tail end of one the most significant financial crises of the modern era, Chandor is quick to point out that the film isn’t based on any one particular financial firm. Despite speculation that MARGIN CALL is a thinly veiled account of the fall of Lehman Brothers—and Chandor points out that the film is “certainly inspired by a true story of what’s going on”—he insists it is merely an amalgamation of the standard practices and cultural norms that exist within the world of investment banking.
Even with a threadbare budget of approximately $3.5 million, Chandor was able to attract top talent to the project. For Zachary Quinto, whose rookie analyst character discovers the shortcomings of the firm’s financial model in place, the complicated moral issues brought forth in MARGIN CALL provided a rare look ‘behind the curtain’ few are privy to outside of the finance world. Referred to as a “rocket scientist” by Simon Baker’s character, Quinto’s MIT-educated character is instructed by Jeremy Irons’ fictional CEO to explain his explosive findings as if he is “speaking to a child.” The alarming notion that the complex mathematical formulations that dictate the actions of Wall Street firms are understood by only a few—even those at the very top—is one that permeates the entire film. Some might have ‘seen this coming’, but many, clearly, did not.
“A lot of what our film is really exploring is that it’s easy to vilify, it’s easy to moralize and judge and blame people for what happened,” Quinto told the New York Times in an interview this past fall. “And not inappropriately, completely! But there’s also a whole swath of people who were just doing their jobs, who weren’t complicit in the decision-making process that led to all of this.”
From the bundling and selling of assets that they knew to be of little to no value to the flippant discussion of money, MARGIN CALL depicts the internal struggles and power plays occurring within a typical financial firm. Chandor himself is fairly comfortable with the financial world, his own father having worked as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch for over thirty-five years. “I knew a lot about those characters – not from a technical standpoint, but from an emotional standpoint,” he explains. “Why they make the decisions they do. Why do some people take the jobs they do? Why do people quit when they quit? Why do people get fired when they get fired? All of those things, I did have a very deep, deep understanding of, just from my own life.”
While MARGIN CALL paints a scathing portrait of the inordinate risk taken on by financial institutions, it also questions the culpability of the individuals and institutions that enabled banks to act without repercussions. Is a financial firm’s responsibility to itself, its employees and its shareholders, or to the general public? When does a investment bank acting in its own economic self-interest cross the line into unethical (or even illegal) actions? In a November 2011 interview with The Guardian, Chandor notes, “If there’s one takeaway from the film it is that hiring and firing and compensation practices are responsible for the way that these companies take risks.” Despite the recent protests that have sprung up throughout the country expressing frustration with the current financial system, it has yet to be seen if Wall Street has been permanently marred from the events of the past few years. The irony of the timing of MARGIN CALL’s release against the backdrop of the Occupy Wall Street movement is not lost on Chandor, who describes himself as a “capitalist who believes in strong regulation.”
“When people are sleeping in the streets over an issue, it’s a canary in the coalmine that all is not well,” says Chandor.