In another life, maybe Margin Call director J.C. Chandor would have worked on Wall Street. Penn Badgley, who plays a 23-year-old finance bro in the film, lauded the debut director’s mastery of financial concepts in an interview with Collider. “He clearly understood the financial world so well. He understood it so well that I was expecting him to be less of a creative… and more of a banker almost.” Given Chandor’s background, it’s not surprising. His father, a longtime banker at Merrill Lynch, raised him within the tight-knit social circles of Wall Street and Canary Wharf. Having absorbed the lexicon, mannerisms, ethos, and psychology of bankers, it would have been all too easy for him to slip into a bespoke suit and trot the halls of America’s highly glamorized financial institutions. Instead, in the aftermath of 2008’s subprime mortgage crisis, Chandor wrote and directed Hollywood’s most realistic finance film, a brisk character study that asks whether taking one’s talent to Wall Street is, ultimately, talent wasted.
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In Other Movies, Wall Street Falls into Fantasy
In the same way that even the most nuanced mafia movies glamorize elements of the gangster lifestyle, every iconic Wall Street film invests in the aggrandizement of what it means to be a banker or a trader. Beloved financial films like Wall Street, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Big Short maintain weighty presences in the cultural consciousness because they’re written and directed by innovative auteurs, display all-timer performances from A-list stars, and have no scruples about exploiting the audience’s desire to watch rich party boys having the time of their lives getting into trouble.
For Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, the source material’s exaggerations are precisely the point. While the broader strokes of Jordan Belfort’s outrageous memoir seem to be true, Scorsese and star Leonardo DiCaprio play on the trader’s self-mythologizing and drug abuse to hammer home that his story isn’t supposed to be taken at face value. Sacrificing realism to subtly undermining the protagonist’s reliability allows Scorsese to embellish the juicy bits of Belfort’s misbehavior. Scorsese finds substance in the spectacle but, save for one crucial scene where FBI agent Patrick Denham (Kyle Chandler) morosely rides the subway, he doesn’t trouble himself with the existential questions that Chandor’s asking in Margin Call. And, given that Belfort hardly bothers himself with empathy, shame, or concern, neither does Scorsese. The point isn’t to make Belfort a well-rounded character or to render finance as a complex industry, it's to portray Belfort as he fancies himself: a flawed legend on a miraculous bender.
Like Margin Call, Adam McKay’s The Big Short endeavors to understand the roots of the 2008 mortgage crisis, but unlike Chandor, any attempt McKay makes at realism are intentionally undermined by his fourth-wall breaking explanations of insider terminology (often doing so using cameos from celebrities like Selena Gomez or Margot Robbie in a bathtub) and his willingness to exploit Wall Street stereotypes for comedy. Take Mr. Chau (Byron Mann), the CDO manager who explains the scale of synthetic CDOs to Mark Baum (Steve Carrell). Chau is an inhuman grease ball without any semblance of a conscience, but who cares? The Big Short’s characters are mostly servicing McKay’s actual goal of explicating a complex and consequential moment in history in a way that audiences will want to digest.
But the most ridiculous of them all is Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, which makes absolutely no pretense at realism. Wall Street is a star vehicle for Michael Douglas (who won an Oscar for his performance as industry titan Gordon Gekko) and Charlie Sheen as his protégé. The movie poses similar questions to Margin Call—Sheen’s Bud Fox is constantly stressing about the morality of his position—but its profound gestures are grandiose and, honestly, a little silly. At one point, Fox finds himself out on his umpteenth floor balcony overlooking Manhattan’s nighttime skyline. Staring out into the endless city, he ponders aloud, “Who am I?” before shaking off his existentialism and scampering back into bed with Daryl Hannah. Maybe more absurdly, the bad guys get their comeuppance in the end. Fox is arrested for insider trading and to reduce his sentence he wears a wire around Gekko, getting the feds all they need to prosecute. It’s a satisfying ending, but if there’s one enduring lesson from the 2008 financial crisis, it’s that guys like Gordon Gekko don’t get taken away in cuffs.
With 'Margin Call,' J.C. Chandor Crafts a Careful Character Study
There’s a reason that so many seasoned actors signed up for film led by a novice director with a limited budget and an airtight shooting schedule: even the smallest parts in J.C. Chandor’s script contain multitudes. Every character subtly navigates what’s left of their conscience as their firm, which seems to be loosely based on Goldman Sachs, realizes that the only way to financially save face is to kick off the coming crisis by rapidly liquidating all of their toxic assets. One by one and without fail, everyone chooses complicity in betraying the public trust. Some, like CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons) and trader Will Emerson (Paul Bettany), create philosophical systems to half-heartedly justify their behavior. Emerson and his boss Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), need the money even after many years of outrageous earning. Others, such as Demi Moore and Stanley Tucci’s characters, are forced to help the firm on its darkest day, succumbing to threats of withholding massive severance packages.
With a chance to enact such rich internal conflicts, Chandor creates space for his cast to work magic, and it's their gripping performances (and some savvy editing) that keep the film moving. He receives incandescent work from Irons and Bettany, alongside pitch-perfect solidity from Zachary Quinto as Peter Sullivan, whose descent from a doctorate in engineering at M.I.T. to a Wall Street risk analyst crystallizes Chandor’s thesis. “I'm a capitalist,” Chandor told ProPublica. “Some wanted this film to be more of an indictment of these people, and that's not where I come from, obviously. A misuse of tremendous potential is what I wanted the film to be about, in a sort of sad way.” If, he argues, the attraction to finance is so great that it’s pulling brilliant people from providing tangible, useful services to the world, then the system is fundamentally malfunctioning.
Stylistically, Chandor avoids making Wall Street aspirational or sexy. Even the brief high-end strip club scene is sobering. Almost the entire film is shot in bland boardrooms and, sure, there’s an incredible view out the window, but no one’s really looking. When Emerson, Sullivan, and Seth Bregman (Badgely) go up on the roof to have a look, Emerson immediately flirts with the danger of having climbed too high, which is, at its core, what each of Chandor’s characters are facing. They conquered the socioeconomic hierarchy and did so at the direct expense of what Emerson would call “normal people.” And now, as they teeter on the edge of their skyscraper, they must reckon with what of them remains if they decide to stay on the roof.
