Margin Call (2011)

I have been teaching the Greek tragedies recently, and Margin Call certainly fits Jacques Lacan's definition of Sophoclean tragedy: the central characters are "between two deaths." Yes, they are walking around, breathing, stressing out. But they are dead, in the sense that all the events of their demise are known in advance. The computer models indicate that the bottom has dropped out of the mortgage market that their Wall Street firm (unnamed, but with an ingeniously bland arboreal logo) trades on. Their servants have run into Death at the marketplace. Everything is already in motion, it is only that by a stroke of luck (?) the firm realizes that the game is up before any of the other players. In Lacanian terms, the "big Other," the marketplace, is still unaware--and has to be kept unaware--of what has already taken place in "the Real" (meaning, in a very strict sense, in a computer model).

It's a great setup. But this movie isn't (until the last 20 minutes) interested in the clockwork mechanisms of Greek tragedy, or in unfolding this setup. I actually can't tell what this movie wants to be about. In very many ways (Kevin Spacey's presence not being the most obvious), we are in the David Mamet world of Glengarry Glen Ross. But Mamet's plays are about something: how men talk. I don't believe for a second that this is how Wall Street talks. The monologues in this movie are preposterous, but so are the little touches. I am reminded of a scene from the Billy Crystal movie Throw Momma From the Train, where a buffoonish aspiring writer of nautical fiction, in a story about a submarine mission, doesn't know the name for "the lever that makes the submarine dive," and so she just writes in this circumlocution. Margin Call has some of the same authenticity problems. Characters are repeatedly telling other characters to "simplify," "speak to me in plain English," "I didn't get to the top by crunching numbers." This is transparently, offensively, on my behalf as an audience member. But it takes all the fun out of the Hemingway/Mamet mode of watching Men At Work.

In economic terms, and in the terms of our political moment, this is an extremely cloistered vision--no "real people" are ever on stage--and yet not an enlightening one. We hear a lot about "formulas" and algorithms and how "complex" everything all is, but none of it seems complex at all. There is literally a character who is a rocket scientist (in a previous career), who is the only person (Nicolas Cage must have turned down this role) who sees the catastrophe coming in advance. But when he explains it, anyone who has ever watched 5 minutes of financial news will wonder how risk assessment failed to take into account historical levels of market volatility. In fact, we are in the presence of magic. David Mamet himself is much smarter here, in his film The Spanish Prisoner, where it really is a Macguffin, a "formula" with no content other than its plot function and desirability. Margin Call doesn't really want to explain finance to us. I contend that if the shoddy product being sold in this film were rotten lumber, nothing would need to be altered. What would be revealed is only that this fails at all to take me behind this particular curtain.

One learns nothing about human nature here. The main character in no way provides, what seems likely at first, a Nick Carraway-style naive moral consciousness that has to learn about the world the hard way. Instead this character disappears for long stretches. No one here is likable. No one makes a tough choice. People have tough options given to them. Unlike Greek tragedy, no one makes the interesting choice to stick it out. They are all pleading with an indifferent fate, bargaining with the sword dangling over their head. But I am making it sound more interesting than it ever is on screen. I'm sure the screenwriter/director thought that "everyone caves in" was an interesting spin, but I would not have advised trying to dramatically improve on Sophocles. Hemingway knew to show us bravery. He looked for it in more obvious places, sure. Margin Call is a failure of imagination. To nudge these characters into ethical "ownership" of their symbolic deaths, or of the mandate following necessarily from their desires, would be to create a fantasy world--no longer Wall Street, certainly. What we get instead is a dramatic stage evacuated of any content: a barren conference room marked "the present day."

[Perhaps it is trivial to say "I learned nothing about human nature from this film." But in fact I wept profusely at the trailer for the puppeteering documentary (!) "Being Elmo" during the coming attractions. There I learned that people achieve their dreams, overcome adversity, share love of others through art, and change lives through belief and passion. Margin Call annoyingly and tritely asked me to unlearn those things, and even though it was 120 minutes longer than the "Being Elmo" trailer, lost in the end.]