Margin Call

The Economy and how it grinds up people has been on my mind of late. Here are some movies I've written about in that subject matter. 

Written at the time of the film's release.

"When The Music's Over (...And the Band Plays On)"
or
"Momma, There's Wolves in the House"

Margin Call begins like The Company Men and Up in the Air—in the midst of a corporate slaughter—people being fired from jobs they've held a long time. Cut-backs. "Generous" severance. Thanks for your service.  Security will escort you out.

Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) listens to it all, a little stunned, but tentative. "Uh, listen," he says in the middle of the administering of Last Rights, "I was working on something and I'm not finished yet." Doesn't matter. Go to your office. Empty your desk. Proprietary information. Your losing your phone, e-mail, etc."No, really..." he says.

Doesn't matter. He's out. On the way to the elevator, he runs into two of his turks, Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) and Seth Bregman (Penn Badgley). "Am I safe?" asks Seth (as Seth is wont to do). But Peter walks him to the elevator to tell him how much his mentorship meant to him. Dale cuts him off. "I know. I was working on something. They won't let me finish it," says Dale as he hands him a USB drive. And as the elevator doors shut, he has just enough time to say "Be careful."

Fwump. 

It's the "be careful" that gets everybody's attention. "He said that?"

Sullivan begs off the traditional drinks for the battle survivors and takes a look at Dale's figures. Then he sees something. Digs, does some calculations and then stares at his projections screen. Over the next twelve hours, the world will go to Hell and he's the only one who sees the gate.

Margin Call is a boardroom thriller about our recent financial crisis, but its played like a mystery story. Everybody speaks in code. The night is dark and no one is betraying secrets. No one knows what's around the corner and everybody's looking behind them for the knife. Written and directed by J.C. Chandor (Who? This is his first film and it is an impressive debut*), it plays out like a conspiracy—it is—and if so much of it didn't anticipate the dawn, one would be tempted to call it a film noir; there is a palpable air of organized evil, built of greed and self-interest, that hangs over the film, for what is being planned is the crime of the century.

The cast is uniformly superb—how could it not be with the likes of Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Simon Baker, Paul Bettany, Demi Moore, and Tucci?—but those performances depend on the great dialog generated by Chandor and the way he presents what should be dry material as drama and intrigue.  These are gangsters in Gucci, cold-blooded, playing the long odds and the fast kill, but instead of "going to the mattresses" they are isolated in fancy cars and well-appointed high-rise board-rooms, their views of the world their actions are affecting armored by safety glass. There isn't much soul-searching (they're business-people, so why look in a dry hole?) about what devastation their actions will bring, except for the immediate future and what it will do "for business."  Even then, loyalty to the corporate mantra of "be first, be smarter or cheat" trumps conscience. That would make a hell of a slogan wouldn't it?

If one could gripe (and there is little to gripe about), one could argue that, if anything, this reverse "Godfather"—where business-people are gangsters, rather than gangsters as business-people—is heavily romanticized. There are no "Masters of the Universe" statements coming from these mortgage titans (as one heard from Wall Street bar-recordings on "This American Life," where these mavens crowed about deserving bonuses from bail-outs because "they're smarter than everybody else"), but, rather, short-term hedges about "dog-eat-dog" survival. No cynical betting against failure schemes, but merely making the best out of a bad situation before everyone else does.  

As bad as Margin Call makes its protagonists, the truth is even worse—there were folks betting on things coming crashing down and profiting from it. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that a fix was in and that analysts saw it coming, not, suddenly, seeing it and going "Garsh, this looks bad." And the worst thing that's happened to these people is a little traffic congestion on Wall Street.

That is, if they're working at all.

* Hey, there. James from 2018 here.  Chandor was no fluke nor a flash in the pan. He followed up Margin Call with the Robert Redford masterclass All is Lost in 2013 and the woefully unappreciated A Most Violent Year in 2014.

All is Lost

Written at the time of the film's release.

Redford at Morning/Sailor Take Warning
or
All Departing the Good Ship Hubris (We're Going to Need a MUCH Bigger Boat!)

I have a friend who once expressed an interest in sailing around the world in a small to medium sail-boat. They're a good friend, but I'd heard enough stories about their seamanship, that I could see it was a Bad Idea.  

Fortunately, I didn't have to say anything that might besmirch our friendship. I was just finishing up Sebastian Junger's "A Perfect Storm" and I left it at his place without mentioning it.

A couple weeks later, that trip never came up again. Manipulative? Sure. But, he's still around.

I should tell him to see this one as a refresher.

Now, All is Lost may have the longest, funniest and seemingly unnecessary scroll of end-credits this year, but that shouldn't discount that it is one terrific movie, with the simplest of plots, only one actor, a minimal of dialogue, and its being the most effective retort to a film-year that has been marooned in digital extravagance but minimal ingenuity.*

All is Lost begins with a "good-bye" letter, read in voice-over. The letter gives no specific information about what the situation is, other than "all is lost now," that he's finally nearing the end of his ordeal, reassuring us that it wasn't for lack of trying and that he "fought the good fight." He'll says he will miss "all of you."

And that he's sorry.

Fade to black.  "8 days earlier."

Boom. "Our Man" (Robert Redford)—as he's called in the credits—is awoken on a boat by a loud bang, and water pouring in. Lousy way to start the morning. He goes on-deck and sees that he's been rammed by a large container of unknown origin floating in the middle of the Indian Ocean. He systematically finds what he needs to anchor the container and steer his boat away from it, so that he can take a look at the gash in the side of his boat and plan his repairs.  He grabs the electronics that have been hit with salt water—laptop, cell-phone, radio—and takes them on-deck. Deep in some back recess of a cubby-hole he finds the fiber-glass repair kit and reads. Then he fashions a handle out of an easily broken piece of wood, whittles it to a point and uses it to pump out the flooded cabin and bring the boat enough out of the water to make repairs, then angles his sails over to the side opposite the gash to keep it above the water-line.

Okay, so that's 20 minutes gone by. The movie presents its protagonist a challenge with several components, which are methodically taken care of, there's no voice-over, no talking to oneself. It's just "this guy," (and you get over it being Redford very quickly), going through the paces of being alone in the middle of nowhere and trying to maintain his only means of support. We don't know who he is or why he's out there. He merely is, and now it appears that instead of sailing around the world, he's up shit-creek without a paddle. Again, no words are spoken, and for the next hour and some odd minutes, there won't be, save for a repeated attempt to hail a presence on the radio, and one long, frustrated "f"-bomb that certainly can be forgiven (and given a PG-13 rating) under the circumstances.

That's everything. A crippled ship on dangerous seas with threatening weather, no communication, and a grizzled old guy who may be out of his depth. Toss in a cruel God with a nasty sense of humor, and set to "liquefy."

Redford has never been better. Frequently, his failing as an actor hasn't been physical, but for some over-thought playing of his lines. That's not here. He's basically living this, doing the work, trying to keep the continuity and pull off a two-hour one-man show of "Sisyphus on the Water" where there's no place to hide. And his lined, haggard face is in that nether-mind-set of showing his thoughts while never betraying them. It's a performance of instincts, and Redford's instincts have always been impeccable. He keeps you engrossed and enmeshed throughout the entire movie.

Credit writer-director Chandor for that (his first movie was the excellent Margin Call).  As simple a project as it might be (and the budget's listed as 9 mil') it's still very close quarters to make a movie in.  The movie does pass the suspension of disbelief rule, as espoused by Johnny Carson.** We're in a limited space no matter where we are, and the only time we're off the boat is when a wide-shot's perspective is needed.  

The end credits are a giggle-fest because the movie is a guy on a boat for two hours, but has such a HUGE list of credits that seem to go on forever (even at one point "thanking" The Pacific Ocean and The Atlantic Ocean). I was amused at all the ADR credits (there is a voice-over at the beginning, but virtually no dialogue to loop). At. All.

But, that shouldn't take away from the film.  

What does take away is the score by Alex Ebert, which is a disaster, at times, confusing one, dramatically, with music that is sonically inappropriate or merely crushingly over-the-top. "Sonically inappropriate" What do we mean by that?   Well, at one point, a rhythmic thrumming is heard as "Our Man" wakes up. Is it a ship coming near? Are we about to be rescued? Why isn't "Our Man" reacting? Why? Because it's only the music...interfering. We can hear it. He cannot (and he's the luckier for it). Look, it's a rookie mistake (and it IS a mistake) to throw in some rhythmic percussion or ANY-thing with a repeating chop, because it can be mistaken for a motor moving unnaturally fast and distinctive from the slow lap of a wave. And when you're in such a limited space, you have to be careful what you do with the music to keep it out of the timbres of the natural sound, ESPECIALLY when the audience is so attuned and taking clues about what's going on from that sound. To add to the earache, Ebert's end-credit song is a stream-of-consciousness list of cliches that ends with "Amen." "Hallelujah," after all, having been taken. It might have been better to leave this one scoreless.

But, that music is the only container-sized blunder threatening this movie's ability to float. And hey, if you want a perfect companion for a double bill with Gravity, All is Lost is your movie.

* And it will continue: if one is paying attention to previews for the coming months, they are awash with dialogue-tropes that one could recite along with the movie: "I'm not afraid of you"/"You should be..." or "I've got it"/"You're going to need it..."  I'll bet those movies also contain "You just don't get it, do you?" and "They're standing right behind me, aren't they?"

** Carson remarked that he couldn't watch any of the "Survivor" shows because he knew that, just out of camera range, there was a Teamster with a maple-bar in his hand.

A Most Violent Year

Standard Industry Practices (Raising Abel)
or
"You'll Never Do Anything Harder Than Looking Someone in the Eye and Telling Them the Truth." (And It's Hard to be a Saint in the City)

J.C. Chandor has made three films now, each one different in scope and breadth, but each challenging as to subject matter and presentation. He does not go the easy way—if any way, he goes the opposite of what might be expected from a film, genre-shaped or no. His first, Margin Call, dared to make drama out of the economic crisis, which it did as if it was the easiest thing in the world (it isn't, ask Oliver Stone) creating a boardroom drama as if it was a high-rise Game of Thrones. His second film, All is Lost, had one star, one actor—Robert Redford—and its survival-at-sea story was told with images and virtually no dialogue that systematically robbed its lone sailor of everything, including hope.

Now, it's back to business, as Chandor takes a look at the oil industry circa 1981 in New York, where the city is divided into turfs of heating oil customers that are treated like fiefdoms of the various oil companies, jealously protected and vehemently guarded—and where there's oil, there's usually fire.

A movie about an oil dealership. Sounds exciting, right? But Chandor always has an interesting spin on the most mundane of ordinary situations, be it crunching numbers, burying a beloved pet, or patching a hole in the side of a boat. His protagonist in A Most Violent Year is Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac, as far afield from his dour folkie of the Coen Brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis), the latino head of the Standard Heating Oil Company. Abel's as hands-on as they come, knowing the names of all his employees, salesmen, truck-drivers. He's worked his way up from hauling tankers to running the company; he knows every step of the way and mentors and coaches his workers based on his own singular success story moving up the ladder. 

Now, he stands on the cusp of his biggest transaction—buying a defunct distribution center from Jewish garment workers so that he can take deliveries right off the Hudson River, without depending on trucking the fuel in. He has 30 days to close on the property, and has put up a considerable deposit, and if he can't come up with the rest of the cash the sellers will keep the deposit and entertain the competing offer of a rival company. The stakes are high and Abel could lose everything.

Of course, there are complications: Standard Oil is becoming a player in the city and the other oil companies are getting aggressive: his trucks are being hijacked, his drivers beat up and hospitalized, the tankers drained to the tune of $80,000 a tank; men with guns are casing his new upstate house; New York's assistant DA (David Oyelowo—appearing twice in one week here!) is investigating his company for corruption—probably because Standard is the least established and less contributing to political campaigns. Throughout that 30 day option window, the stakes will get higher and the violence will increase.

Jessica Chastain gives David Oyelowo an unfortunate gesture.

At home, he's getting pressure, too.  His wife, Anna (Jessica Chastain) is the daughter of a Mafia family—if Abel shows weakness on any front, Anna merely has to call her brother and father and offers will not be refused. For Abel, that's an easy offer not to take. He's working the business his way, on his own path, negotiating the shoals the best he knows how. And he won't stoop to using the same tactics that are being used against him. So, he's constantly at war—with his competitors, with the teamsters, with the government, with his wife—everyone who is considering the easier path, the simpler path, the one with no conscience and the least resistance.

Except by Abel, that is. Very early on, the visual of Abel in expensive suits, a camel-hair coat and the steady gaze with hooded eyes reminds of Al Pacino's Michael Corleone from the Godfather series. But, this is completely different. Michael was a corrupting influence in a normal world, even in the corrupt world of the Mafia. In Abel's world, the corruption is already in place and he's attempting to resist and change by example. And Chandor's philosophy is counter to Coppola's (and Marlon Brando's) who saw the Mafia as a metaphor for Big Business. Chandor sees Big Business using the same tactics as the Mafia—being interchangeable with them with turf wars, shakedowns, intimidations and criminal activity being condoned and encouraged for market share and territory. There is the constant temptation (especially when deadlines are looming, the banks aren't co-operating, and violence is escalating) of fighting fire-power with fire-power, of doing wrong until you get caught, that looms in front of Abel.

A Most Violent Year is very familiar, but in a different context.  It is an anti-Godfather, where the world is no less cynical, no less hard or even criminal, but there is one man who, though surrounded by and acknowledging all of that, still finds a better path, walks it, talks it, and will not be deterred. It's a movie about something rather rare in modern drama: a hero.