Margin Call - We're Back!

I first heard of Margin Call when I was in the movie cinema about to see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I distinctly remember the trailer capturing my attention as a movie I had to see. I finally got the chance to see it the other day and and I was rather impressed.

Despite what the trailer made the movie out to be, with its action noises and loud, epic music, The whole storyline was composed mostly of dialogue. Margin Call follows a New York Banking firm, 24 hours before the market crash on the New York Stock Exchange happened. As times were tough. Many workers were being let go from the banking firm, One of these workers includes Eric Dale who happened to be halfway through working on some important statistical data before he was fired. Eric manages to give the research to one of his friends, Peter who was still in the company with the instructions to “be careful” whilst looking at them. Peter fills in some of the blanks that were left out of Eric’s original findings and realizes that the company is in trouble. Big trouble. Peter takes his information to the executive team to decide what to do, and after numerous meetings, explaining the situation to everyone the final agreement is to have a fire sale of the shares, knowing that after the following days trading is over, that will be it for the company,

I thought that Margin Call was an interesting movie. In some ways it seemed like quite a complex job but looking at the big picture it comes off as simple and effective.  The story was told through the dialogue. Lots of talking, lots of conversation. The talking was fast moving and despite what the movie was about, it didn’t dive too far into the technical terms of the business world. The music built up the climaxes and the silences carried across emotion really effectively. I noticed a lot of this happening when the executive team are panicking so they are yelling at each other. The Characters were another part that was interesting, there were only two actors I had seen before, so it was definitely a fresh cast. Simon Baker from the Mentalist and the Actor who plays the Boss from the corporate job in Horrible Bosses. The acting was no standout performance but it wasn’t terrible. It seemed they were the right guys to play business characters and they got the job done.

Some things I didn’t like about Margin Call. The ending. The whole movie is the buildup to the fire sale of stocks and after the big sale, nothing much after that happens. I would of like to see the next few days or months too see what happened to the company. Another down point was the lack of explain what exactly went wrong or was going wrong in the movies case. There were plenty of opportunities for the script to spell out in black and white what the problem was but it always seemed that the characters knew what was going on without anyone having to go into to much depth.

I fount Margin Call a relieving break from my past streak of big action movies that seem to be screaming in my face to watch and be amazed at how good they are, it was a relaxing step back but it still told a great story. The time seemed to fly by as I watched it and for all the reasons above I am going to give Margin Call a three out of five.