While it's usually the individual trader in the stock market who fears the dreaded margin call, this financial-world thriller capitalizes on a case in which it's an investment bank that can't pay its debts. Drama is the capital as we watch a failing Wall Street institution discovering and dealing with its default in an environment of downsizing and stress. But for these high-stakes players, there's an out, even if It comes down to the kind of ethics that gives them a bad rep.
The 36-hour story begins with the clearing out of all personnel above a certain age, regardless of the market savvy and experience they might possess. Symbolizing that group, Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), a chief analyst in the risk management department, is the first of that group to be dragged away from his computer and allowed only to pack his belongings and clear the building under the suspicious gaze of a security guard -- and just when he was on the edge of confirming that there is a problem with the company's balance sheet.
He's not even allowed to forewarn anyone about his suspicions. All he gets a chance to do is save his work on a flash drive which he manages to pass on to his junior, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto, Star Trek), with the cryptic warning to "be careful." Sullivan, once an actual rocket scientist and now an under-appreciated asset to the brokerage, takes it seriously and pores over Dale's document. What he finds is nothing less than a doom scenario. The firm owes more money than it can pay. Meaning that the value of its stock is zero and that downsizing is going to be the forerunner to total disaster.No one yet knows that they have been wiped out and are on a ship heading to the bottom, but the management hierarchy is about to find out and face the consequences of the smug corporate culture that has prevailed in the elite suites. From Peter's immediate boss Will Emerson (Paul Bettany), his boss Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), everyone's boss Jared Cohen (Simon Baker, The Mentalist), the surviving members of the risk management department, icy Sarah Robertson (Demi Moore, Flawless) and Ramesh Shah (Aasif Mandvi), the earthquake reverberates between and among them until they have to call in the CEO and major shareholder of it all, John Tuld (Jeremy Irons, Appaloosa). After staging a dramatic appearance with his helicopter arrival on the roof in the black of night and absorbing what his staff of experts are telling him, he makes the ultimate decision on how the liquidation is to proceed.
Only one resister emerges from the company's management hierarchy. Rogers, the brilliantly effective head of the trading floor and the key to dumping the company stock for what they can get before the market awakens to its real worth, opposes Tuld on ethical and moral grounds, giving us tension and suspense as big honcho exposes his fangs and the all-nighter wears on toward the market opening at 9:00 AM, EDT.
It's evident that debuting writer-director Chandor knows his stock market and brokerage houses as well as the types that inhabit them. With a background in music and fashion videos, documentaries and commercials, he chose a subject for his first feature film based on his father's 30-year career at Merrill Lynch. The knowledge he gleaned from his dad's work pays off in what he has brought to the screen in this timely depiction of market upheaval. But, somewhat curiously, he writes with the pen of a playwright, with scene after scene staged in groups of two or three characters stressing out, challenging decisions that don't sit well, anticipating bleak futures, controlling panic -- just as such theatrical dissections of consequences might appear in alternating spotlight circles in a Broadway theater.
But, due to the incisive nature of his dialogue and a plot that builds to an always-in-doubt conclusion that affects lives and raises desperation, the episodic scene structure proves, on balance, not to be a critical fault. A big tentpole feature from the major studios, (Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, The Company Men and the upcoming revenge-on-your-broker comedy Tower Heist with Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy) it's not, and the actors involved should be commended for their participation at well below their normal pay grades in a worthy low-budget exposé of Wall Street practices.
The major payoff is in the performances. Spacey and Tucci achieve perfection in roles that might have been created for them. Bettany, for the most part, controls his flair for theatricality and plays it straight for once -- to excellent result. And Quinto's keen portrayal of a fresh, brilliant upstart is finely tuned, without a hint of artifice or arrogance, exactly as it should be in this framework.
This was a time when Wall Street was lured into the easy money of credit-default swaps and other derivatives designed for the market movers to suck up every hard-won dollar from a public suckered into buying a rosy picture of risk. When the illusion turned into reality, real "too-big-to-fail" institutions got their margin calls, all right, and waves of suffering from the financial drownings they caused have been rolling over global economies to this day.
Chandor's movie gives us a lesson in market dissolution. The movie may be talking above the audience a good part of the time, but it's a knockout jab into the guts of what's wrong with Wall Street, and it pays to pay attention.
