Margin Call

Margin Call! Mike downloaded it onto his television set somehow the day it was released in theaters, because of Apple, and made me come over so I could review it. Mike loves making people watch movies they don’t like. Once I lost a game of Bingo and as punishment I had to write a scholarly essay about “McHale’s Navy.” Hint: the submarine is a phallic symbol.

So yeah, this boring-ass movie has a top-notch cast, a cold blue gleam, a brutal adherence to strict “realism” (read: total boringness, because real life is FUCKING BORING, news flash to Hollywood cinema), and a topical topic about money and capitalism and the great crash of 2008 and men in their fancy, fancy suits. It’s ostensibly a dramatization of what occurred over a 24-hour period in the Lehman Bros. firm (? are they a “firm”?) that ultimately ruined the economy of America or something. Like Wall Street, there are many glowing computer screens and men yelling numbers at one another. Who knows what any of these assholes actually do for a living? My guess is “almost nothing” but what do I know? I made $12,000 last year*.

“Margin Call” however eschews the usual techno-babble of stock-market-based movies to deliver just the melodrama without any of the information, which frankly I appreciated, because that information always seems like made-up bullshit and I can’t understand it anyway. This was the first thing that was cool about this movie. The second thing was Kevin Spacey’s character. There is nothing else cool about this movie, except possibly for a very long story about a bridge during which Stanley Tucci recites a lot of show-off math and then Paul Bettany is like “come back to the office and they’ll give you eight hundred and eleventy million diamond dollars” and Tucci is like “no,” like Paul Bettany you did not understand the story about the bridge and the math AT ALL.

So the melodrama of the stock market crash was delivered without any of the usual accompanying attempt at explanation, which, as I just said, was pretty cool. Characters are all bent over computer screens saying things like “Oh fuck, is this figure for real?” and then somebody else is like “don’t look there, look at chart #4 that’s where it all comes together” and then everybody goes “oh shit call Jeremy Irons AND SOMEBODY FIND ME STANLEY TUCCI!” So we, the audience, comprehend that something regarding numbers and money is deeply fucked but we are spared the inane process of trying to actually understand what it is these crazy douchebags do all day in between taking bumps in the men’s room. And to that I say: HUZZAH

On two separate occasions, an older authority figure says something like “tell it to me in plain English, you know I can’t read all these computer thingies” and then whoever they’re addressing just says MORE CRAZY THINGS. I do think that the audience was meant to understand the things said to the older men who asked for plain English, but the discrepancy between my Math and Verbal SAT scores was so great that my college counseling office called my parents in a fury demanding to know why I hadn’t been classified with some crazy learning disability wherein I am one half a year-3000-type-genius and one half a 30,000-year-old grunting caveman. So I’m going to hand it over to Mike, who, after we watched “Margin Call” together, attempted to explain the sub-prime mortgage rowdy-dow using a variety of model shipping containers he inexplicably owns as visual aids, and who will now explain the stock market crisis of 2008 in the following block quote:

This is harder in just text. So the banks loan money out, and eventually make more money on interest. Yay for them! But they can get some of the money sooner if they sell the loan to someone else. Let’s say I am the banker (because I own a double-breasted suit) and Yours Truly wants a loan so she can buy a shack by the river. Fine, here is $10,000, and with interest I will have, let’s say, $12,000 when Yours Truly finally pays me back. But I don’t want to wait, cause my boat needs a new keel. So I sell the loan to my friend for $11,000. I get a $1,000, and he gets a $1,000 once Yours Truly pays off her loan.

So far it all makes sense. But then, let’s say Jessica wants a loan too cause there is a river shack next to Yours Truly. But Jessica has bad credit, and I don’t think she’s going to be able to pay me back. On the other hand, I only make money when I make loans, so I’ll loan her the $15,000 (cause the price of river shacks is on the rise!). Then my jag is in the shop, and I need some fast cash, so I decide to sell Jessica’s loan. But my friend knows that a freelance writer isn’t likely to pay back a loan, so he won’t buy it. Dammit. Now I’m in a bind.

Lucky for me my old friend Yours Truly wants to buy a second river shack. So I loan her the $20,000 to buy it and then I take that loan and Jessica’s loan and combine them. That’s now a $35,000 loan that should pay back $38,500 after interest. So I make a nice $1,500, and my friend who buys the loan gets $2,000 after those two pay off their loans. Yay! My jag is fixed!

Unsurprisingly, Jessica can’t make her payments. So my friend who bought that loan now owns Jessica’s river shack. The problem is that he can’t sell it for shit because the price of river shacks dropped after a flood reminded everyone of how shitty river shacks are. So now he has paid $40,000 for a $20,000 loan that will only make him $2,000 and he has a river shack worth $3,000. That’s a loss of $35,000.

My friend is desperate, and honestly it’s a bit of a stretch that I call this guy my friend. I mean, we go to the same club and have played golf a few times, but it’s not like I’ve ever been to his house. So now is my chance! I buy the loan he still has for $8,000 and I get to keep the interest of $2,000. He’s happy to do it because now he has lost “only” $29,000, and that means he’ll still get his sweet bonus at the end of the year.

But my plan backfires. Yours Truly is tired of living in shacks down by the river, but she can’t sell because she’s paying off a $20,000 loan on a shack worth $3,000. So she bails on the shack, and I’m left holding that $3,000 shack and out the $8,000 I paid my friend! Oh well, I still get my bonus too! Yay!

Thank you, Mike! A shitty river shack is sounding like not a great investment for me at this point. Really regretting getting that loan from you!!! WHY DIDN’T I GET A HARVARD MBA? “Why am I such an asshole? Why did I forget to make money in post-war Iraq?”

**note! I also want to add that Mike has developed a cinematic theory whereby you can always tell who is a bad guy by determining which man is wearing a double-breasted suit. There are no–repeat, NO–double-breasted suits in this film. Thus there are no villains! THE ONLY VILLAIN IS CAPITALISM ITSELF. I forgot that this was something cool about the movie too. So four things.**

So Only-Human-Man Kevin Spacey’s nice old dog is dying and he’s really upset about it, but has to get off the phone with the vet so he can go make a douchebaggy speech to all the stockbrokers (? whatever they are) about buying and selling and such-and-such, because they just fired 80% of the floor and everyone is stressed out. He’s like “don’t be stressed, you didn’t get fired! APPLAUSE!” not that great a speech. But then, he becomes super humanized via a shot of him caressing his nice old lady dog as she lays quietly on the vet’s table in preparation for being put to sleep. That’s all it takes for someone to be humanized in my mind! Then he goes and gets all the middle-of-the-night Zachary Quinto crisis information in plain English and is like “god damnit I told them this was going to happen 2 fucking years ago,” so now we know he’s like the Last Good Man In Finance and that he doesn’t want to sell toxic assets (?) on the trading floor (?) tomorrow morning like Jeremy Irons is going to make them do, which is unethical and such-and-such. So then Spacey makes a GREAT SPEECH at the end where he delivers the lines Jeremy Irons told him to deliver, but with such totally subtle sarcasm that you can somehow tell he doesn’t agree with a single word he’s saying. I can’t really describe it but it’s so good, so subtle and brutal and just like, that’s why they pay The Space the big bucks I guess (in real life, not in the film (although in the film he is also paid the big bucks)).

The upshot is that everyone in the movie made eighty five billion trillion dollars even though their company got thrown into the garbage heap by greed and capitalism and everybody ruined their relationships with their clients forevermore. Demi Moore got 10.8 million dollars just for showing up and letting Jeremy Irons blame her for the whole thing even though it was also Simon Baker’s fault. Stanley Tucci also gets 10.8 million dollars just for showing up (he does some more show-off math when he explains how much that means he’s making per hour) because he said they said if he didn’t they’d take away his health insurance. Um, where does the money all go, you guys? Does someone who makes millions of dollars every year really need to stress out about health insurance? Dude, even fancy health insurance is only like, I don’t know, $2000 a month, depending on if you’ve ever seen a doctor in your life before (if you have, it’s more like $30,000 because obviously you’re a liability and are going to die of a lingering illness any minute), but regardless, doesn’t Stanley Tucci have enough tucked away to pay his COBRA benefits for awhile, while he figures out how to get back into bridge-building? These people are all LITERALLY ROCKET SCIENTISTS, I don’t understand why they’re so bad at having savings accounts. Then again I’d do pretty much anything, no matter how humiliating, if someone would pay me 10.8 million dollars. I would eat worms. I would cut off my pinky toe. I would have sex with literally any person(s) on the earth, in any position (t)/s/he(y) wished. So more power to you, Stanley Tucci. Also Paul Bettany actually describes where all the money goes during a scene on a roof with a helicopter where Quinto is like “Where does all the money go” and Bettany’s yelling about hookers and spending $75,000 a year on restaurants, which made us all laugh really hard but then it’s like, why are we laughing? I BET THAT SHIT IS REAL.

(I lost my bet of “one million dollars but only if I don’t have to pay” with Steve–I was positive that sometime during Act II Stanley Tucci was going to show back up after being fired, and he’d be in PJs and/or a robe. He did show up, and he was dissheveled, but he was still in his suit. Mike noted that “the moral of this story is that businessmen never take off their suits.” This was also dramatized by the fact that at the 3 a.m. meeting where Jeremy Irons tells them they’re all up shit creek, everyone is extremely finely coiffured and dressed and Demi Moore has her makeup impeccably done. I don’t even like to put a bra on if I have to get up at 3 a.m., so, again, I guess that’s why these guys get the big bucks)

The movie closes with Kevin Spacey crying while digging a grave for his dead dog in his ex-wife’s yard. The end credits literally roll over only the sound of grave-digging and crying. THAT IS VERY BADASS. It just like real life (the economy)!! So I forgot that there are three good things about this movie: the lack of explanation of the stock market crisis; Kevin Spacey’s character; and the end credits rolling over the sound of someone digging a grave for a dead dog just like capitalism.

*plus the thing about the double-breasted suits and there being no villains.

Here are a bunch of pictures of the cast of “Margin Call” hamming it up together. “Don’t ask me!” Look at The Tucc! What a cutie

*actual figure