people
without choices
by Douglas Messerli
J. C. Chandor (screenwriter and
director) Margin Call / 2011
As the camera winds in and out of
the population of the offices within the glass-lined offices and halls of a
downtown New York City office building, we are quickly swept up into a world
that we immediately recognize as being both exhilarating (even the window
views, when we get a glimpse, are vertiginously beautiful) and extremely
claustrophobic (not only can everyone see each other, but the camera scans the
row upon row of computers where the lowest of company employees must daily sit
shoulder to shoulder as they convince their favorite customers to buy and
sell). All in all, it is a most unpleasant world; yet everyone in view is well
dressed and groomed and apparently eager to go about his or her daily business.
And, so we soon learn—mostly through the inquiries of the youngest and most
junior man on the company payroll, the brash self-centered Seth Bregman (Penn
Badgley)—they have good reason, in their own thinking, to be so well-dressed
and eager: they each make a lot of money, from hundreds of thousands to
millions! These are the Wall Street investment traders of whom we have read so
much about in the past few years because of the myths surrounding them, dished
up mostly in overwrought films, and the effects they have had upon our lives, related
through newspapers and the television news medias.
Almost before we can completely
assimilate the world in which he have suddenly discovered ourselves, several
younger employees, including Bregman and his associate Peter Sullivan (Zachery
Quinto)—having just caught a glimpse of a small herd of hired henchmen, about
to fire a large percentage of their co-workers—mutter to their soon-to-be
senior supervisor, Paul Bettany (Will Emerson)—“They’re going to do it right
here, in front of everybody?” He suggests they simply hunker down, pretending
that they don’t exist, as the evil-minded squadron call out individuals one by
one to meet with them. We follow the firing of Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci, Head
of Risk Management) where he observe the impeccable scouring process: he has 49
hours to accept their benefit program and must immediately collect his personal
belongings and leave the building; his computer access, and codes, and even his
personal cell-phone have been deactivated.
A long-time employee, Dale meets the situation with a kind of saddened
resignment. Certainly, he’s seen it all before, but he cannot resist mentioning
that he is in the middle of important computer research. All activities will be
taken up by others who remain, he is told. Even though Bregman and Sullivan
have been told beforehand of what was about to “go down,” they are startled by
the turn of events—particularly since Dale has taught them nearly everything
they know—and attempt to apologize to their former colleague. At the last
moment, as he is about to take the elevator down into a metaphorical
non-existence, he hands Sullivan a USB drive, warning him to handle of the data
he may find there carefully.
By the time Dale and other company
regulars have been axed we have already journeyed from a kind of
documentary-like presentation of the back halls of companies like Lehman
Brothers, which brought down the US economy in 2008, to a kind of would-be
horror film in which the
monsters are not as mythic as they
are disturbed and troubled fellow human beings. As the other late-workers clean
up their desks, Sullivan remains, obviously intrigued by Dale’s warning.
Opening up this new Pandora’s Box, he discovers a series of imaginary projects
of the volubility of his company’s accounts which quickly reveal that, in their
combination of good and outright rotten securities (failed loans and other
investments without any real money behind them) have already resulted in
possible losses far beyond the worth of the entire company. In short, if any of
their trades had come up for question, the entire company would have
immediately gone into a bankruptcy that would affect the world stock market.
Indeed, they have in the past week reached days in which the bad securities
have outweighed the good. By day’s end, it is suddenly suggested, the entire
financial world may collapse because of their activities.
Writer and first-time director J.C. Chandor has done such a remarkable
job in these few scenes to set up the entire situation, that despite the
terrifying encounters we know must occur throughout the rest of this story, we
can now almost sit back and watch—with some comic relief—how this truth plays
out as the evidence slowly makes it way up the corporate ladder, where each
person of high rank knows less than the one before him. Sullivan calls back his
junior partner, Bregman who confirms his findings. Together the two call-in the
not very bright street-fighter Emerson, who demands they find the now missing
Dale, and takes the information up to his supervisor, Sam Rodgers, Head of
Sales and Trading (Kevin Spacey), perhaps the most likeable and
conscience-stricken of the all this film’s characters. Rodgers has been with
the firm nearly longer than anyone except the company’s CEO. We first meet him
in tears as he suffers the loss of his dog from cancer, and he receives the
information with all its due terror, recognizing that, despite whatever
decision they make that night, it will change everything for everyone.
Jared Cohen, Head of Capital Markets (Simon Baker), a self-loving,
obsessed individual involved in wheeler-dealer international deals recognizes
the implications without really being able to understand the consequences.
Chief of Risk Management, Sarah Robertson (Demi Moore) has long recognized the
consequences, and has even warned of the implications previously, but has
refused to admit the reality of the situation actually taking place. Even the
fact that she has warned against it will ultimately be held against her, as she
finds herself, in the end, asked to play the company fall-guy. By slowing his
film down and restating, each time in slightly different terms, what the
problem is, as difficult as it is for those not in finance to understand, the
director allows us to engage with each of these rather despicable figures and
the realities they suddenly come to perceive. Yes, they are all greedy, and
they would kill each other to keep their positions in the firm, but they are
also all very human, much like business men and women in every field of
endeavor. Even if we do not want to quite admit it, they are visions of people
somewhat like us, men and women trying to find and maintain the good life.
The sound of a helicopter announces the arrival of company CEO, John
Tuld (a reminder, obviously, of Lehman Brother’s head Richard Fuld) brilliantly
acted by Jeremy Irons. Tuld knows little of what Sullivan has actually
discovered, despite the fact that he has intentionally created the very
circumstances in which this situation could occur, while denying that he has
ever “cheated.”
His job, he assails, is not to know the details of company actions, but
to imagine
a future in which the company can
continue to survive and financially exist. Although every individual introduced
to us has already perceived the only choice with which the company is faced,
none of them has the effortless disdain of the human species that Tuld exudes.
For him, everything can be reduced to an inverted truism, a kind of illogical
maxim that justifies his acts. Even destroying his own customer base by selling
them bad products and, in that process, destroying his own company and the
lives of thousands throughout the United States and abroad is preferable to
losing the lionized position as the man at the top; besides, he knows that no
matter how much money is lost, how many lives are destroyed, the company is—as
we later learned in reality—too big to be allowed to completely fail, that,
like a phoenix, it will rise again. He will receive a whopping bonus, moreover,
for just having remained at the helm.
In one of the last scenes of this
emotionally tense film, we return to the men and women shackled (a bit like the
oarsmen in Ben Hur to the chains of a
Roman warrior ship), who knowing they are losing everything, friendship,
admiration, self-respect and their own jobs by selling out the bad company
wares to the very customers who have previously lined their and the company’s
pockets. How did such individuals return home to look into the faces of their
families that night, one can only ask?
The fired Dale is rounded up, and told
that the company will destroy his benefit package if he does not return to the
company to serve as another head to be rolled out to trustees and government
inspectors. For a moment, even the long-term denier Sam Rodgers, realizing that
he does have a conscience, rushes up to confront Tulde, demanding to be let
out. Tulde threatens him with withholding all his benefits. What is an
individual to do without the money to pay for his new house? By film’s end even
the firm’s rocket scientist, Sullivan, offered and accepting a promotion in the
company, has been corrupted.
This sad film ends with Sam, having returned to the home in which once
lived and where he his ex-wife continues to reside, is found digging the yard
in the dark. Earlier he has told a colleague how he began life as an engineer,
building a bridge between two local cities that saved the citizens of the
regions thousands of hours of automobile time in their daily travels. Perhaps,
he postulates, he was meant to be a digger, a man who makes his mark in the
world by creating a deep nothing, a hole. At least it would be something real,
something you can see, he muses. Into the hole he now digs he will put
something, his beloved dog, perhaps the only “thing” he has truly been able to
love.
If Chandor’s film does not openly offer an alternative, I’d argue it
certainly does suggest one. None of the money-loving creatures the film
presents surely truly believe in their object of
desire. They, better than anyone,
realize just how meaningless money is as an actual object: a piece of paper
with painted figures upon it. It is only as a kind of commodity, a symbol of
something else that lures them on. Yet one by one, they proclaim—just like the
Nazi soldiers and ordinary citizens after World War II—they had no choice but
to do what they did. If my metaphor is seemingly exaggerated, I apologize. Yet
these people—and all of the others of us—who insist upon choosing the minor and
larger lies and frauds of daily business over honesty and fairness, who swindle
our friends in the very process of pretending to provide them with something
necessary to their lives, might well proclaim the same thing: we have no
choice; it’s the way of business. But, of course, we do have choices, if only
we are willing to forego, even temporarily, the reward of allegiance to that
empty cause.
Given what happened in the years following this brilliant film, both in
terms of business and politics, the cynicism that has perhaps helped even
destroy democracy, this film is a must see for one who might still care enough
to dig a hole in their backyard in which to bury a beloved pet.
Los Angeles, November 5, 2011
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2011).
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