With recent history and the current winds so stiff with economic grief, it's no wonder films such as the recent layoff-centered drama "The Company Men" struggle to find a sympathetic paying audience.
That picture and the new, more interesting "Margin Call" operate not as cries from the heart, gut punches or anything you'd find in the early 1930s, say, when Hollywood studios produced an astonishing (and often astonishingly fierce) variety of antidotes to the Depression.
Rather, these New Recession stories have a resigned, dispassionate air, even as they're careful to allow glimmers of hope for the nice characters while clearly delineating the moral boors who don't have our best interests at heart.
Shot in less than three weeks for $3 million by first-time writer-director J.C. Chandor, "Margin Call" is on the facile side, but it's well-crafted and smartly acted. The time is 2008, approximately 24 hours before news of the meltdown of the financial markets became news. An honest, hard-working junior analyst (Zachary Quinto) receives information from a recently sacked superior (Stanley Tucci) indicating the company, indeed the entire national and international economy, are about to go under.
What happens next in "Margin Call" is a series of meetings, mostly within the offices of the fictional investment firm, as the sharp-edged key players — portrayed by Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Simon Baker, Demi Moore and, as the weaselly CEO, Jeremy Irons — decide what to do and to whom it should be done. Mightily, Chandor resists the urge to turn even the most obviously soulless slickos on view into subhuman specimens. The atmosphere is hushed, the feeling of panic restrained but unavoidable.
Chandor's not yet a vivid dialogue man ("This is bizarre ... it's like a dream," goes one line), and I wish he'd found a way to make the audience-identification figure played by Quinto more than pleasant and honorable. But the little things add up here, mostly in the pauses before, during or after these company men and women realize their worlds are forever about to change. And how.
'Margin Call '
Grade: Three stars
Genres: Thriller
Running Time: 105 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
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