Indie Spirit Best First Feature Nominee: Margin Call

———-

It’s hardly a surprise that a movie chronicling life inside a major financial firm during the 24 hours before the Wall Street collapse of 2008 would be dominated by men. Margin Call boasts a stunning ensemble cast featuring Kevin Spacey, Stanley Tucci, Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany, Zachary Quinto, Penn Badgley, Simon Baker, and Demi Moore as a group of investment bankers, analysts and traders at fictitious financial firm, loosely based on Lehman Brothers, as the bottom falls out of the mortgage-backed securities market. 

Moore plays Sarah Robertson, the steely head of risk management and only woman on the management team. We don’t actually see Moore or meet Sarah until close to midway in the film and she’s given sparse dialogue. As the film unfolds we start to see why.

Instead, the film opens in September 2008 as this unnamed investment firm is in the process of terminating 80 percent of its risk-management team. The terminations are executed with the cold precision that only corporate HR professionals can muster and magnified by the self-importance that fuels Wall Street corporate culture. It’s an assembly-line of assets in and liabilities out and even from the beginning we see the a shedding of “waste” that frames the rest of the drama. 

Senior risk analyst Eric Dale is one of those fired. Dale, played brilliantly by Stanley Tucci, gets the news just as he’s about to discover that the company is recklessly over-exposed in bad mortgages. Dale’s termination, and his behavior in handing over a flash drive full of damaging information to Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) telling him to “be careful,” initially sets the story up to suggest Dale was fired just before becoming a whistleblower but instead suggests the fate that awaits anyone else who might question the culture of risk at the firm.

It’s not until the junior analysts have put together the pieces laid out by Dale and alerted their bosses that the real faces of the financial crisis emerge and among them, Sarah Robertson. We first meet Robertson in an emergency middle-of-the-night meeting with upper management to discuss the firm’s exposure and create a strategy to handle it. The strategy, the firm decides, is to dump the bad debts and offer up an executive sacrifice as the face and blame of the disaster.

Of course they choose Robertson.

The writing is on the wall and it’s clear in Moore’s performance that it’s an outcome Robertson must have been bracing for her entire career. During the meeting Robertson points out, firmly but not too aggressively that she had warned the firm of problems with the mortgage-backed securities and nothing was done. The men in the room just look at her. It’s clear. She’s going down for the whole thing.

Almost the rest of Moore’s performance consists of Robertson sitting in her office, looking out across Manhattan both a part of Wall Street and isolated from it’s upper reaches–the logical and final destination for female executives in this world. 

Writer/director J.C. Chandor’s father spent almost his entire career working for Merrill Lynch and its obvious he understands Wall Street culture. Bright ambitious talent gets wooed away from careers that better serve society like engineering and the sciences, to make buckets of cash moving around buckets of cash. There’s a sense of conspicuous waste in nearly every scene. Boxes line empty trading cubes as nameless traders cycle in and out. Nothing’s permanent and nothing’s real except for the stories of all that cash.

Given Chandor’s intimacy with Wall Street life it’s hard not to see some deliberate choices behind Moore’s character. Shortly after the 2008 collapse some of us started asking if the financial crisis would have been mitigated, or perhaps avoided all together, had more women served in executive functions and on boards of directors. It was hard not to broadly generalize but the major Wall Street Firms–Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America–the list continues–all firms where women were virtually absent in leadership and culture building. In their place was a testosterone-fueled culture of rampant greed and avarice, a world where 25-year-old traders were promised million dollar bonuses over t-bones and strippers and nobody blinks. It’s hard to imagine that culture existing so robustly with a lot more women involved.

And that hypothesis seems to infect Moore’s character and her performance. She’s at once tough, ambitious and intensely insecure. You get the sense she’s used to having her work more heavily scrutinized, less-readily trusted. At first during the emergency meeting Moore comes off as emotionless and cold, almost robotic in the face of catastrophe as if aware that showing any emotion as the only woman in the room would automatically kick her out of the club. Later when she’s waiting out the night in her office Moore offers us a woman tragically isolated and coming to terms with the fact that her brief foray into the forbidden world of male privilege has officially ended with not much more to show for it except a severance package that will ultimately cost her reputation and sense of dignity.

The fact that Moore’s character had warned of the crisis approaching and was alternatively ignored or blamed for not warning emphatically enough also perfectly captures the bind so many women in corporate culture face. As head of risk management Moore’s character was in charge of managing exposure and was the voice responsible for setting the culture and appetite for risk. It was the woman who first saw problems, tried to draw attention to them but was ultimately not taken seriously and was dismissed. Rather than push the issue Robertson knew what she had to do–push ahead like the men around her. 

By the end of the film there’s not much left to Moore’s character. She’s practically an afterthought as daylight breaks and the trading panic ensues and we close with a sense that nothing much will change even after the house of cards comes crashing down.