Margin Call

Margin Call takes place in 2008, on the night before the global financial system went into free fall. It begins with an analyst in a major financial firm's Risk Management department smelling a rat, snowballs into late-night and early-morning meetings of increasingly powerful and terrified members of the firm, and culminates in the run that was the next day's market activity. It's terrifying stuff, way more terrifying than any number of dudes in any number of masks chasing any number of college kids through the night.

It's also annoyingly writerly. Many of the characters get big speeches, and those speeches nearly always sound more like the finger-wagging of hippie writers than the misgivings of mathematicians. Whenever Margin Call pulled me into its world through its spot-on set design and world class performances, it pulled me right back out again when some character started moaning about how he could have been building bridges instead of getting rich.

Nevertheless, the film's sense of mounting dread giving way to panic was effective; and its snappy editing and kinetic (for a film that felt like a stage adaptation) photography kept things moving along. Margin Call caught me up in its narrative in spite of its preachiness. Further, even though I knew how it was going to end, I wanted to know how it was going to end. Overall, I call this one as a good film. But I'd rather see the play.