Wick's Review

Summary - Great 4.0

Wall Street gets stripped bare in this brilliantly depressing takedown of überleveraged trading houses, what used to be known as Investment Banks. An acting tour de force about the fall of a Lehman-like firm, Margin Call plays like a Wall Street Glengarry Glen Ross.

Several in the stellar stable of actors get to chew on terrifically flawed characters: a wealthy man who cares more for a dying dog than real people; brilliant men who turned away from eminence in science or engineering for the financial rewards of trading. Rich stuff.

While the financial particulars of this fictionalized drama sound rather like balderdash, the credible macro scenario, taut drama and terrific acting make Margin Call the best movie yet about the Great Crash of ’08.

Acting - Great 4.0

Great acting? Let’s run it up the flagpole and see.

• Zachary Quinto, plucked and plucky, as a onetime rocket scientist who confirms financial disaster.
• Paul Bettany as his Aston Martin driving boss. Bettany elevates any cast, as with his ship’s doctor in Master and Commander.
• Stanley Tucci as an early casualty of the firm’s collapse. Tucci adds wary intelligence to any cast.
• Kevin Spacey as their boss, a nuanced reprise of his Horrible Bosses character.
• Demi Moore as an ineffectual risk manager constantly seeking to divert responsibility.
• Simon Baker as Spacey’s young boss. The Mentalist is well suited to play such a wunderkind.
• Jeremy Irons as the billionaire head of the firm. Irons purrs like a lion in repose, deadly and commanding.

Props also to prettyboy Penn Badgley as an entry-level MBA type.

Film - Really Great 4.5

Steroidally extreme leverage – the main issue that felled Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns – gets mostly elided, while capitalism is assumed a zero-sum game per Left Wing cant, yet rookie auteur J.C. Chandor’s indictment lands several solid blows. He touches on how trading became hostage to models that few understood, that had minimal connection to real world economics and that was worthwhile only when levered up by an order of magnitude.

He also suggests how ineffectual the Risk Management people are in such an environment. By providing a false sense of security, then shunted aside in the rush to sell a deal, they appear more to enable than protect.

Edge - Risqué 1.8

Reality - Glib 1.2

The trading model disaster is described in mumbo-jumbo that rings false, as if rendered by a screenwriter who doesn’t really understand how it works or doesn’t trust the audience to understand.

Ideally it would have illuminated the insane leverage that Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch undertook. Apparently the leverage limits largely came off in 2004, as reported in an ’08 NY Sun article Ex-SEC Official Blames Agency for Blow-Up of Broker-Dealers. Previously the Investment Banks were allowed to be levered as high as 12-to-1. Starting in ’04 they went as high as 40-to-1. Margin Call dramatizes how that worked out.

Now it appears that 40:1 was mere child’s play. A mid-sized trading house named MF Global went bankrupt over the Halloween 2011 weekend that Margin Call premiered. Run by former NJ Senator and Governor Jon Corzine (reputed to be a potential Treasury Secretary if Obama wins reelection), Forbes reports Corzine had MF Global leveraged 80-to-1. Apparently the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law created by his fellow Democrats didn’t head him off at the pass. Who’da thunk it?

Finally, one character laments that he “used to build” things. I hoped he was going to reflect on real investment banking: i.e., assembling the capital to construct bridges or factories or even to facilitate takeovers. Instead he reflects on a former career as an engineer. Worthy enough, and speaks to the siren song of Wall Street money draining quantitative people from engineering and science. However, it would have perhaps been even more effective to lament the decline of investment banking on Wall Street.

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