“There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat.” The most quotable line from J. C. Chandor's under-appreciated finance drama Margin Call might read like a winning Monopoly strategy, but when spoken by a sharp-suited Jeremy Irons during the film’s most important boardroom scene, it plays like a revelatory blueprint for beating capitalism.
Adam McKay’s excellent tragicomedy The Big Short is rightly regarded as this generation’s go-to financial crisis biopic, but Margin Call – which you can stream via Tubi, The Roku Channel and Amazon’s Freevee service for free in the US, or on Prime Video in the UK or on Netflix in Australia – deserves its flowers for being an equally damning look at where it all went wrong for the world in 2008.
What is Margin Call about?
Set almost exclusively within the glass confines of a fictional Wall Street investment bank, Margin Call opens with the dismissal of risk management chief Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), a long-serving member of the firm whose final words to his wonder boy associate, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), are "be careful". Talk about ominous.
Determined to finish his boss’s work, Peter discovers, in the small hours of the same shift, a multi-billion dollar, potentially cataclysmic hole in the firm’s finances (or more specifically, the “biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism”), which naturally sends its top brass – played by Jeremy Irons, Demi Moore, Simon Baker, Kevin Spacey and Paul Bettany – into panic mode.
I won’t reveal more than that basic premise, but rest assured that the firm’s extremely well-heeled executives (for context: Jeremy Irons’ character pulls up to the crisis meeting in a helicopter) are more concerned with preserving the profitability of their corporation than they are with the stability of… the entire US housing market?
A pop culture force
In fairness, it’s easy to point fingers at the financiers whose unchecked greed blew up the economy and doomed an entire generation of people for a decade, but Chandor's exceptional script does well to pose uncomfortable questions about what others would do if faced with the same dilemma: would you put yourself out of business to save a hundred others? I’m sure we’d all like to think we selflessly would, but the reality is less than black and white.
Margin Call, then, is a star-studded exercise in humanizing the people we love to hate, and a damning indictment of a system that continues to make the world go round. Sure, it’s not the most hidden of hidden gems on the best streaming services – Chandor’s writing was nominated for an Oscar, for goodness sake! – but it’s certainly a movie that deserves more attention (and potentially a spot on our lists of the best Prime Video movies and best Netflix movies), especially considering the pop culture force that The Big Short has become.
Margin Call is now streaming on Tubi, Amazon Freevee and The Roku Channel in the US, on Prime Video in the UK and on Netflix in Australia.
You might also like
