I happened to be there that morning in 2008, not as a banker but a trespasser: a reporter covering Wall Street, I had sneaked into the building with the help of a trusted source. As I avoided security guards and surreptitiously filed reports from a men’s-room stall, what struck me most was the absence of panic, the strange stillness that seemed to permeate the place: the melancholy silence of a once-great global corporation staring into the void.
Wall Street movies, which must find entertainment in ticker symbols and balance sheets, tend to fall somewhat short of Wall Street reality, where millions of dollars can be won and lost with all the pomp of a mouse click. Filmmakers like Oliver Stone and others have tried to inject a palpable sense of the underlying stakes. Think of the mano a mano Blue Star Airlines fight in Mr. Stone’s “Wall Street,” the glamorous merger in “Working Girl,” or the commodities frenzy at the end of “Trading Places.”
Then there’s the new film “Margin Call,” which recounts 24 hours in the life (and near death) of an unnamed firm facing a Lehman-like crisis. It may be one of the quietest films about Wall Street ever made.
Its showdowns take place not on Hamptons estates or at motorcycle races but in sterile boardrooms, where lives and careers are upended in muted conversation. It forgoes screaming-on-the-phone scenes for coolly lighted images of traders calmly working their desks. Gordon Gekko, this is not. And that’s fine with J. C. Chandor, the film’s first-time writer and director, who was never aiming for the master-of-the-universe approach.
“You walk onto most trading floors, and the more tense things get, the quieter they become,” Mr. Chandor said over lunch the other day. Pausing for a laugh, he added later: “It is sort of a challenge! It’s not very exciting visually, a bunch of people stressing out.”
“Margin Call,” which Mr. Chandor, 37, wrote in the days after Lehman failed, was an effort to understand the human side of a financial crisis, or as he put it, “the decision-making process that got us into this mess.” The idea was to avoid oversimplification. “Everything in my gut said don’t lie here,” he said. At the same time, he told himself, “Don’t blow this up into something that it isn’t.”
Other cinematic takes on the financial crisis have aimed for grander themes. Mr. Stone made “Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps” as a morality tale, pitting Good against Gekko. Like the original “Wall Street,” with its pro-labor overtones, it also served as something of a liberal manifesto against the evils of unchecked capitalism and consumption. The more recent “Too Big to Fail,” an adaptation of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s play-by-play account of the Lehman collapse, tried to make an action hero of Henry M. Paulson, the former treasury secretary — perhaps the ultimate in Hollywood fantasy.
Mr. Chandor said his approach “doesn’t mean there isn’t a great truth” to those other films. “But they are a little bit amped up.”
In its attention to human fears and foibles, “Margin Call” resembles a higher-end version of “Boiler Room,” also a low-budget Wall Street film, but one set in the unsavory world of penny stocks. Yet Ben Younger, that film’s writer and director, laughed at the idea of another stock-market-related film.
“I’m frankly surprised they’re still making them,” Mr. Younger said. “Between ‘Wall Street,’ ‘Boiler Room,’ ‘Wall Street 2’ and then ‘Too Big to Fail,’ I felt that kind of covered every iteration of a finance movie.”
For Mr. Younger, the inevitability of financial folly — and real bankers’ odd veneration of ostensibly evil characters like Gekko, an irony he highlighted in “Boiler Room” — has turned him sour.
“These people keep taking advantage of the system, and we keep getting burned,” he said. “What else is left to explore? It’s in the headlines every day, and nothing else seems to change.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 16, 2011
An article on Page 10 this weekend about the new Wall Street movie “Margin Call” reverses the names of the two characters in the 1987 movie “Wall Street” who slugged each other in a scene in Central Park. It was Michael Douglas’s character, Gordon Gekko, who punched Bud Fox, played by Charlie Sheen.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=68ff1552acb94715968b35d3737963c7
Speak Your Mind
You must be logged in to post a comment.