http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott The Long Drop Down By James Wolcott October 23, 2011
Margin Call, written and directed by J. C. Chandor. Although it has the title and Wall Street setting of a doomsday financial cliffhanger (I anticipated something akin to Alan J. Pakula’s Rollover, with trading floors going mad as dominos tumble worldwide), it’s actually more of a mood piece, a tone poem tolling that the Time has Come. It beautifully makes use of Manhattan in the deep of night seen from on high from a eyrie, with dawn symbolizing not a better day, a rebirth of hope, but a dream-deprived awakening to disaster. Margin Call has been compared by one critic to David Mamet’s signature work, those hyperverbalized clashes of raunch and rapacity, but apart from the presence of Kevin Spacey (he was the in-house whiphand in Glengarry Glen Ross and is even better here, mellow, filled-out), I can’t see it--or, rather, hear it. What’s remarkable and daring about the set-to’s in Margin Call once it’s clear that the company (presumably based on Lehman Brothers) is leveraged beyond the max and headed for collapse is the level tone and manner flecked with tension that the actors take. They don’t shout or filibuster, like those Mamet characters who sometimes sound as if they’re addressing a gale; with the exception of Demi Moore, it’s a man’s world in this skyscraper citadel, yet these alpha males and their beta juniors don’t have the ballsy bravado associated with Masters of the Universe. Even the late scene when Spacey (the muffled conscience of the firm) confronts chief exec Jeremy Irons (who chews his vowels as if impressed by his delicious elocution) isn’t played as a dramatic showdown. It’s more like something out of The Godfather, conducted in a cone of quiet, and all the stronger for that. Chandor even does something interesting with the characters’ cursing, a true novelty in these sewer-mouth days. The recurring phrase in Margin Call is “Fuck me,” used not as a command but as a muttering lamentation, as in Fuck me, I’m totally screwed; fuck me, this time we’re truly fucked. It’s ironic, in context, because what the firm is about to do is totally fuck its customers by foisting crap debt on them before the entire mortgage derivatives system implodes. They’re pitying themselves on the eve of pissing on their clients big-time. With a responsive intensity that suggests his brain is grinding its molars, figuring out the next move, Paul Bettany plays this cocky narcissism with a brilliance that’s funny and yet oddly sympathetic. He positions himself as the rueful voice of veteran experience even though he’s just a couple of years older than the junior cadets around him. When one of the cadets (played by tousled Penn Badgley) remarks that “people are going to get hurt” by the fallout from this debacle, Bettany says, yes, “people like me,” to which the other guys says, “No, real people too.” Bettany’s hotshot doesn’t qualify as a real person because he’s such a self-made caricature--the lean and hungry Wall Streeter who lavishes money on hookers, bar tabs, and a zoomy convertible. But you feel that he’s tricked out on these things because this is what’s expected of someone his age and income bracket; he’s consciously playing a part. And Bettany’s Will Emerson is also the one who’s the keenest animal sniff of what’s in the air, what’s in the wings, how it’s all going to go down. At one point early in the film he sets himself on the railing of the skyscraper, as if preparing himself for the precipitous fall, rehearsing it. Some have said that Margin Call is the movie Wall Streeters need to see to understand why the Occupy Wall Street movement has taken hold, to understand the damage they’ve done. It’s a noble sentiment, but pointless. Wall Streeters at the apex understand what’s happened since 2008, even if they haven’t personally suffered; it’s not that they can’t see, but that they don’t care. And it’s quixotic to expect them to. It’s like expecting those at a high-stakes poker game to care about the poor schmuck losing everything at roulette or the one-armed bandits somewhere else in the casino. Guys (and occasionally gals) like these only care about the others at the table; those are the stakes and the opponents that matter to them. The Average Person doesn’t register. That’s why reform has to come through rules, regulation, and reform rather than appeals to conscience, civic duty, economic justice. Crash after crash after avaricious crash is built into the binge-and-purge organism of investment capitalism, as Jeremy Irons points out while having a lordly breakfast at his little table with the panoramic skyline view of morning Manhattan lying before him. He isn’t engaging in Gordon Gekko grandstanding. The mood of Margin Call is too melancholy for that. From its opening frame, it has the gravity of a funeral for a death that hasn’t yet happened, the suspended pause before the long drop down. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
