Michael M Grynbaum
On the day that Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, shattering confidence in the banking system and sending the stock market into a tailspin, the trading floor at the firm?s Midtown Manhattan headquarters appeared surprisingly calm. Bankers conferred in whispers; some quietly fiddled with r?sum?s. The only obvious signs of tumult were the television news trucks parked outside.
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 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 JC 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,? 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 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. Stone made Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps as a morality tale, pitting Good against Gekko. Like the original Wall Street, with its pro-labour 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.
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 unsavoury 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,? 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.? 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 seems to change.?
Margin Call did not stem from a desire to indict the system. Somewhat akin to Stone, the son of a stockbroker, Chandor grew up watching his father, a Merrill Lynch investment banker, muddle through the day-to-day challenges of a career on Wall Street.
?He was a lifer,? Chandor said of his father, who recently retired. ?I was watching that human side of it: when you?re depressed, when you?re not depressed, when you?re up or down.?
A realistic film also fit with Chandor?s realistic budget: a former director of commercials who briefly detoured into real estate, he was doubtful that he would have much money to play with: ?How do you tell a story about one of the biggest global things that?s happened in the last 15 or 20 years for under a million bucks??
The budget ended up at $3.5 million, after the project was picked up by Before the Door Pictures, the actor Zachary Quinto?s production company. It helped attract a cast of actors, including Jeremy Irons, Demi Moore, Kevin Spacey and Stanley Tucci, in addition to Quinto, who plays a junior bank analyst.
?A lot of what our film is really exploring is that it?s easy to vilify, it?s easy to moralise and judge and blame people for what happened,? Quinto said. ?And not inappropriately, completely! But there?s also a whole swath of people who were just doing their jobs, who weren?t complicit in the decision-making process that led to all of this.?
So is this supposed to be Requiem for a Banker? ?It was a little more complicated,? Quinto said. ?I knew I came out of it with a strong intention to not invest in the stock market, that?s for sure.?
Peter Sullivan, Quinto?s character, is the one who discovers the sour assets that may doom the company. Though he spends much of the film wondering whether the world of seven-figure paychecks is worth saving, it?s fair to say Peter is no Bud Fox, the Wall Street character who is slugged by his boss, Gordon Gekko, while wearing a wire for the feds.
?He has a deeply rooted moral ambiguity about it,? said Quinto, who added that he and the filmmaker discussed his character?s arc at length. ?It was hard for me as an actor to reconcile Peter?s choices.?
Margin Call happened to be screening around the corner from the old Lehman offices, and I stopped by for a look. The building is now festooned with the logos of Barclays, which acquired Lehman after its bankruptcy, and the trading floor was filled with a new crop of bankers, plugging away at their desks. It looked a lot like business as usual.
