- Title: Margin Call
- Duration: 109 minutes
- Country: United States
- Director: Jeffrey C. Chandor
- Script: Jeffrey C. Chandor
- Year: 2011
- Synopsis: A respected financial company is downsizing and one of the victims is the risk management division head, who was working on a major analysis just when he was let go. His protégé completes the study late into the night and then frantically calls his colleagues in about the company's financial disaster he has discovered. What follows is a long night of panicked double checking and double dealing as the senior management prepare to do whatever it takes to mitigate the debacle to come even as the handful of conscientious comrades find themselves dragged along into the unethical abyss.
'Banking and finance' in the film
Margin Call is presented as the film that not only made it easy to understand the financial crisis but, above all, denounce those responsible for the economic crash. The film revelation on Wall Street, tells the fall of Lehman Brothers and portrays the behavior of financial power and excesses that led to the capitalist system to the worst crisis since the Crash of 1927.
The film traps, in particular, with the story of contradictions that live two heads of finance night of bankruptcy of a major investment bank. On the one hand, the capitalist appears who cares only about the money, even if their decisions by a catastrophic depression is loose. On the other hand, it portrays the head of sales who, after running all adjustment plans in the company, enters a breakdown of values knowing that would be initiating a global collapse. Output, argues that all that could be avoided with better control those who make the decisions. Given these two positions, the film is inclined to the second and presents the former as the culprit of all evil. A bad start that will lead to the economic crisis.
Personal commentary
In the wake of the crisis that rocked world financial markets in 2008, many people asked that very question engineers disaster. How a man to reality faces failure? a failure that can not only cost him the job but threatens the livelihoods of millions of people. Margin Call, the fascinating and torn thriller J.C. Chandor takes us into a territory that has not brought us any other film: the heart of one of those financial giants of Wall Street too big to fail.
Margin Call reveals a truth that is as moving as disturbing: that men and women who were at the origin of the financial crisis were just ordinary human beings who, by their knowledge, intelligence and his amazing rewards, end up being victims of their negligent, short-sighted and irresponsible priorities. Wall Street may not have a soul, but individuals working in their sanctuaries of power if they do. Margin Call tells the story of these souls and the longest and darkest night of their lives, where they are on the brink of a precipice that they have contrived.
One can say without exaggeration that fall into the financial crisis has affected all inhabitants of the planet, but Margin Call roots come from a very personal situation screenwriter and first-time director J.C. Chandor.
One of the key scenes of the film, without any doubt, is the following:
Another of the most important scenes of the film takes place in the investment bank, where spent the whole plot, in it we can observe the hours before the start of the economic crisis of 2008.
