Review: Margin Call (2011)
Margin Call is a maddening film. It has commendable aspects, mostly on the performance side of things, but it ultimately doesn’t come close to adding up to a satisfying whole. While the all-star ensemble cast of veteran actors give it their best efforts, they can’t elevate a thinly developed script and wholly uncinematic direction.
The film follows an investment firm on the eve of the 2008 Wall Street collapse, and how one employee’s number crunching led them to realize that they the end was near. We then see them scrambling to gain control of the situation and preparing for the inevitable financial meltdown. The problem is, this collapse has come from the inside, not just miscalculated numbers, but rather through embezzlement and fraud. Egos are challenged, tempers flare, moral compasses are tested, and everything goes to hell in a hand basket.
On paper, this sounds like the formula for a thrilling, smart, engaging piece of filmmaking. Unfortunately, that is not the case at all. The screenplay does nothing to illuminate any of what is really going on, first and foremost because it fails to illuminate a single character beyond their lines of dialogue. We’re never given any insight into a single character’s motivations and inner-workings beyond where they stand ethically or financially. It makes for a completely uninteresting group of people that the audience won’t care about because everyone is a motivation zombie. Strong performances by Jeremy Irons and Kevin Spacey help give their characters a bit more depth, but they’re only able to do so much with what they’ve been given. Irons in particular stands out as the slimy no-nonsense CEO of the firm. One gets the sense he improvised a good deal of his dialogue, because it seems like he’s from a different film most of the time. All of the complex business lingo in the world can’t save a script that isn’t interested in developing anything or anyone beyond faux intellectual complexity.
The other biggest issue is that the film doesn’t have a cinematic bone in its body. Normally, a talking heads film would be fine as long as it succeeded as visual storytelling. Films like The Social Network and The Insider succeed at this because even amidst all the talking heads, they follow the rules of show, don’t tell. Unfortunately, Margin Call fails to do this, and becomes nothing more than thinly developed characters we don’t care about thrown into a situation with no context or intrigue. It takes more than great performances from Jeremy Irons and Kevin Spacey to make a film. It needs a compelling story with compelling characters, and Margin Call is disappointingly devoid of all these.
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