Margin Call (2011) [Blu-ray]
Drama | Thriller

Be first. Be smarter. Or cheat.

Set in the high-stakes world of Wall Street, Margin Call is an entangling thriller involving the key players at an investment firm during the earliest hours of the 2008 financial crisis. When an entry-level analyst unlocks information that could prove to be the downfall of the firm, a roller-coaster ride ensues as decisions both financial and moral catapult hte lives of all involved to the brink of disaster.

User Comment: endecottp from United States, 24 March 2011 • Saw this at New Directors festival in NYC and really enjoyed and was engrossed in this film. A great cast with splendid performances. The film is very intense and although it is about a company involved in the financial meltdown of 2008, it really is about much more. I particularly liked the way the film depicts the frightening absolute and ruthless power of the corporation over the lives of people that work there as well as the implications and ripples for everyone else.How those people get sucked in to the embrace, security and pleasures of what the corporations have to offer and the consequences and vulnerabilities of those choices.The freedom and comforts that we cherish here in twenty first century USA are not as secure as we might think. Don't want to say much more, other than that "Margin Call" is very involving and in the end affecting and thought provoking.It packs a powerful punch.

Summary: Really good. Go see it.

User Comment: mgorman-6 from United States, 23 October 2011 • Saw this last night. Set at a Wall Street firm on the night in 2008 when the leaders realize that changes in the market will wipe them out if they don't immediately stop selling the products that have been making them all rich, the movie centers on the moral dilemma - recognized by some characters but dismissed by others - that they face in unwinding their positions, saving themselves but shifting the pain to others.

The movie finds a way to hold the mirror up to our civilization, showing how we are all complicit in a collective 'dream' (one character says at one point, in response to another who says he feels like he is in a 'dream', 'Funny, it seems like I just woke up'). The dream is the illusion of easy, risk-managed wealth that the financial markets manufacture, again and again, since the emergence of capital markets 200 years ago, until the illusion morphs overnight into a panic. Reality intervenes, fear takes over, and the 'survivor' is the guy who first reaches the lifeboat. So there are no villains in this movie, just people, richly drawn, beautifully acted characters realized by some of our best actors who relish the opportunity to show what they can do given a killer script and enough screen time between lines to actually be the people they are portraying.

Central to the movie's success:

1) It gets across the essence of what is going on in the financial markets without bogging us down or dumbing it down

2) finding a moral question that can be resolved in a night, yet which is nevertheless a perfect allegory for the whole set of moral questions raised by an economy that works the way ours does, rewarding false confidence, recklessness, and deceit as often as industry, skill, and integrity

3) the placement of young, innocent but perceptive characters at the center of the drama, who function as our eyes and ears, who are like stand-ins for all of us who weren't there, at the heart of the dream machine, when the latest fantasy of easy wealth was exposed as a collective delusion

4) really 'gets' the trader ethos and manner - they are a kind of warrior caste, foul-mouthed, impulsive, deeply selfish, surviving by their ability to outplay their counterparts, and yet living by a warrior code that sets boundaries on what they will and will not do to one another (having spent three years on Wall Street several panics ago, it rang as true as any movie I have seen on the subject)

It's like Mamet, except you don't have to work as hard to figure out what everyone's up to. It's like Chinatown, except the 'crime' is something far worse than molesting a single young girl. These guys f****d the entire planet, for Ch*****sake. It's like the best movie I've seen in a little while.

What an incredibly sure hand from a director on his maiden voyage! Who is this guy? Whoever you are, please don't stop. I would pay a lot to see what he could do with topics like 'the decision to go to war', or 'the emergence of China/India/Brazil/Indonesia from poverty to global player'. Hell I would go see him revive Mother Goose, after this debut.

Summary: Quietly gripping morality tale - a near perfect movie.

[CSW] -4- This was a near perfect movie with an understanding that could only come from a director that had a family member that took him to work with him at a young age such that he not only got an inside look at the inner working of the traders but came to understand their personalities. Made without judgment, sympathy or hostility this movie gives an excellent look at how one piece of information went from a low level worker to the top of the company and the decisions that everyone from the top to the bottom were required to make within the confines of their own personalities. If I thought I could get a deeper understanding by watching this again and again I would add it to my collection, but if you watch it carefully enough the first time you can really come to understand the personalities, motivations, desires, situational helplessness and decision that each person was forced into. That is what made this a near perfect movie.
[V4.0-A4.5] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.

º º