Friday, January 31, 2025

"Too Soon" to "Just Right": MARGIN CALL & THE BIG SHORT

by Adam Thas
How movies take the pulse of a nation.

It’s hard to believe that this year will mark the 17th anniversary of the financial collapse of 2008. Manufactured by Walls Sreet dealing in subprime mortgages, it caused economic hardship for billions of people across the globe. Despite the pain of the entire experience for many, a silver lining can be found in the fantastic cinema to come out based directly or indirectly around this subject. Documentaries like Inside Job were so good they won the Academy Award, or one of my favorite documentaries of all time, The Queen of Versailles, showed us not just the macro but also the micro results of the crisis. Through the pile of fantastic movies to come out during this time, two in particular have always fascinated me more than the rest: Margin Call from 2011 and The Big Short from 2015.
One of the first movies out of the gate after the crisis, Margin Call boasts a stacked ensemble cast featuring Stanley Tucci, Demi Moore, Kevin Spacey, and Jeremy Irons, and follows a fictional investment bank (we all know it’s Goldman Sachs) over a 24-hour period as they are the first ones to realize what is about to happen to the economy and how to limit the impact on their books. If you haven’t seen Margin Call, don’t take it personally; while it was nominated for Best Original Screenplay, it had a modest $3.5 million budget and grossed just under $20 million worldwide. It spent some time on Netflix and cable, but has gone under many people’s radar.

2015 gave us the biggest of all the “Financial Crisis” movies: The Big Short. While Margin Call had a stacked cast, The Big Short had a “hold my beer” moment, giving us Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, and Marisa Tomei, to name but a few, as well as small bit parts from names like Margot Robbie and Selena Gomez. Based off a book, The Big Short follows real-life investors that end up making a lot of money betting against Wall Street. The movie also had over 10 times the budget of Margin Call at $50 million, grossing nearly $130 million worldwide and winning the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

To understand these movies, you need to first understand the timeline of the Financial Crisis. While the roots of the crisis go back decades, it remained mostly in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg until September 2008. In just over one month -- from September 7th until October 10th -- the US saw the nationalization of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Washington Mutual, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the government bailout of insurance company AIG, and the eventual stock market bailout, which saw then-presidential candidates Senator Obama and John McCain suspend their campaigns to deal with the crisis. What followed was unemployment, homelessness, the blame game, and JC Candor beginning to write Margin Call. Not even two years after the collapse of the global economy, Margin Call began filming in June of 2010. As I stated earlier, Margin Call follows a fictional investment firm as they are the first to realize the coming disaster, but this movie isn’t about the disaster or how it happened. It’s about how a small group of people react to the crisis.

The best way to describe what makes Margin Call so fantastic can best be described through one scene. As company CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) walks into the boardroom for a late-night meeting, everyone stands and, rather than walking directly to the head of the table, he pauses and sees someone he knows at the table, smiles, and give him a hug. The person he hugs is never seen again, given a name, and the relationship between them or why Tuld hugs him is never explained. This happens repeatedly throughout the movie, with characters interacting with either “Fuck you” or hugs. Margin Call is presented as if we are watching a two-hour special of a weekly series. These characters have history, and the movie treats the audience in a way where all you need to know is these two characters hate each other for the plot to work and erases any need to explain why. While it features an ensemble cast, the plot unfolds by mostly following Paul Bettany as a veteran broker named Will Emerson, who fits the typical stereotype of a Wall Street broker -- divorced and spending all his money on booze, cars, and strippers. Joining Bettany is Penn Badgley and Zachary Quinto, who play fresh-out-of-college twentysomethings named Seth and Peter respectively. Peter (Quinto) and Seth (Badgley) act as our entrance into this world: they’re the new guys and we’re introduced to this world through their eyes.
Tonally, Margin Call is this weird mish-mosh of horror, thriller, and disaster movie that adds a splash of film noir, feeling more like Eyes Wide Shut than a Thursday night television drama. Absent from the movie is any detailed explanation of what is happening. Instead, we view characters' reactions to seeing charts and data. We don’t know what it is they’re scared of, but we know it’s bad. We follow along as these characters put past drama aside to defeat this coming disaster and survive the night. Most of this movie takes place at night in empty board rooms, in the backs of cars or clubs. The mood of Margin Call is not a happy one; there is no “happy ending,” and rather than winning with honor, our “heroes” defeat their foe by screwing everyone else over. The audience is not meant to walk away from this one feeling good about the state of the world it creates.

Less than four years from the release of Margin Call, we were given The Big Short. Besides having an ensemble cast and being about the financial crisis, that's where the similarities between the two movies end. Where Margin Call is a dark, dank, horror-based drama, The Big Short was nominated for Best Comedy or Musical at the 2016 Golden Globes. What is so impressive about what The Big Short is doing comes from its source material. Rather than a work of fiction, the book The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine is nonfiction. The people in the book are real, the actors are asked to interpret real people. Most importantly, though, The Big Short is about the “what” and “how” of the crisis and not the reaction to it. Having to base a story on real events and keep the audience engaged in a story it already knows the end result of is not an easy task.
The Big Short follows three separate storylines that at no point interact with each other. The first is a group of investors led by Mark Baum (Steve Carrell), a broker who is tipped off by another broker, Jared (Ryan Gosling), about the looming crisis. We spend the most time with this group and they’re the ones doing the heavy lifting regarding the “what.” We are along for the ride as Mark travels the country meeting strippers and mortgage brokers with low morals as he uncovers the reality of mortgage-backed securities. Separate from this is a second storyline following Brad Pitt as a retired trader and broker who helps a group of young investors. This group serves to show the difference between the “have” and “have-nots” of the industry and how the system is made to keep so many people out. Lastly, and the storyline that got the most awards recognition, is the storyline involving Christian Bale as a reclusive hedge fund manager who makes billions from the crash.

Years after the crisis, The Big Short puts all the pieces together and does so as a big budget movie. To have mass appeal in a procedural movie where the height of drama is whether or not a wealthy person can make more wealth, and filled with terms like “Mortgage-Backed Securities,” “Derivatives,” and “Sub-Prime,” The Big Short needed to be engaging. One of the more memorable scenes is Margot Robbie in a bubble bath explaining what the term “Subprime” means. The movie is peppered with these tiny vignettes, as well as a cast of side characters we meet along the way that are so over-the-top they could be Hannah-Barbera villains. The Big Short shows its greatness by taking a complicated and relatively boring subject and giving it mass appeal. People who knew very little about the crisis were given an approachable way to understand it by making the movie light-hearted and filling it with talented stars.
After The Big Short put the exclamation point at the end of a run of movies regarding the crisis, we can look back 10 years later at the bigger picture. What we get is a beautiful example of which movies reflect the national consciousness. As someone who lived through the collapse, I remember what it felt like. Myself and millions of other Americans were mad beyond comprehension as neighbors lost their homes or jobs while we received daily news about the people who caused the collapse receiving bailouts so they could go back and do it again. At one point in Margin Call, Will Emerson (Bettany) laments to his younger coworkers about his wealthy bosses, saying, “When all is said and done, they don’t lose money. They don’t care if everyone else does, but they won’t.” In 2011, Margin Call and lines like that reflected the mood of the country. We were in a world that felt hopeless and filled with the worst kinds of people. We were not in the mood to laugh or joke about the situation. Like most tragedies or hardships, however, the survivors survived. We moved on. The country and world recovered slowly and by the time we got to 2015, we were in the place where we could start to laugh at the situation. Had The Big Short come out in 2011, it would not have succeed the way it did in 2015. The national conversation was not in a place to joke about their situation.

Movies often reflect our national consciousness, be it the fast-paced patriotism of Top Gun, or the Gen X cynicism of Reality Bites, but very few times can we look back at a group of movies and see a timeline of our national attitude, the very moments where it went from “Too Soon” to “Just Right.” Margin Call and The Big Short do just that.

2 comments:

  1. I LOVE The Big Short. Good point that it would've felt off if it came out earlier.

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  2. Seconded! Any movie that can teach ME what credit default swaps are... is definitely doing something right.

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