Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.
I don’t pretend to understand financial markets. Watching the financial markets collapse a decade ago affected me less than it did a lot of other people because I don’t tend to play in markets, but it was scary nonetheless. For those of us who don’t work on Wall Street, the greatest frustration of the destruction of the housing market was probably the fact that virtually no one who caused the problem suffered any real consequences, or at least suffered the consequences that we thought they should have. Margin Call tells this story with the sort of cold dispassion that it seems to require.
Margin Call takes place over two consecutive days at an unnamed trading firm that seems to have been based on Lehman Brothers. The film starts with a huge percentage of the staff on one floor being let go. Included in that culling is Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), who works in risk management. Eric tells the people who are letting him go that he’s been working on something that he’d like to finish. They send him off anyway, and on his way out, he hands a flash drive to Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), telling him to finish his work and to be careful.
