Wall Street Saga Makes Excellent Thriller

Margin Call is an edge-of-your-seat thriller that I understood very little of.  Yes, you read correctly. 

Let me explain.  I am not a finance person.  NOT.  I know that to save money, you have to set it aside.  In a bank.  Or under your mattress.  Or in a fund.  Or in stocks. 

See, I can handle the first two (bank and mattress).  After that, that’s when I encounter the problems.  Funds and stocks.  Might as well be rocket science and astrophysics. 

And even though Margin Call deals with figures and facts and all sorts of stuff like that, it still, for a financial dummy like me, holds up as a great, tense thriller.  So, basically what I’m saying is I got the gist of the suspense without understanding WHY there WAS suspense. 

A great ensemble cast helps make this film one of the best thrillers of the year, but what really, really shines here is the story.  Loosely based on the Lehman Brothers collapse of 2008, Margin Call is 24 hours in the life of a large investment bank…or rather 24 hours in the DEMISE of a bank. 

We all want to know what happened in 2008 on Wall Street.  Will this film give you all of the answers and secrets of what went on at Lehman and Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns and on and on and on?  No…most of us will never know what really went on in those companies to lead to the financial meltdown. 

But, this film gives a nail-biting picture of what MIGHT have taken place.  And how it MIGHT have felt.  And what MIGHT have been said.  Mostly, though, this is a thriller.  A quick-witted, hard-edged thriller about people we, chances are, do not like. 

Sure, with some of the less seedy characters…we connect with them.  But, there is never sympathy that we feel with or for any of these characters.  And even though the actors are playing a bunch of financial geeks or fat-cat CEOs that are hard to like, the performances are all stellar, especially Stanley Tucci as a laid-off, frustrated guy whose work starts the whole mess off and Kevin Spacey as an upper-management employee who must accept some impossible decisions by the higher-ups. 

Again, to tell you what any of these impossible decisions are would be over my head.  But I do know that the tension and frenetic pace of this film keep even the Wall Street ingénue glued to the screen. 

Margin Call: 2011, rated R, 107 minutes, directed by J.C. Chandor, starring Zachary Quinto, Stanley Tucci, Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, Penn Badgley, Simon Baker, and Jeremy Irons.  The Niles Library owns this title on DVD. 

Have more fun. Get Patch delivered free to your email inbox. Learn more.