Front Page Reviews & AIR

It’s a lot easier to demonize someone when you don’t think of them as human.  In order to justify the beheadings, lynchings, stonings, exterminations, and stake-burnings that litter human history, the case is typically made by the perpetrators that the victims are somehow “sub-human” (Stalin being a notable exception; he didn’t waste time justifying anything—apparently he was too busy condemning his enemies to the Gulag).  Whether this sub-humanizing effort takes the form of accusations of racial inferiority, ritual uncleanliness, obscene opulence, or demonic possession, it generally eliminates the need for annoying trivialities like trials or due process.  After all, they aren’t like us—they aren’t even really human.

So when I read some of the anti-corporate diatribes of writers like Matt Taibbi, a few warning signals begin to go off in my mind.  For instance, even in Taibbi’s groundbreaking—and painstakingly researched—2009 Rolling Stone article “The Great American Bubble Machine” he says, “The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”  Though I agree substantively with most of what Taibbi has to say in his Rolling Stone articles (and admire his balls for standing up to the corporate juggernaut), his incendiary language and bubbling vitriol also make it relatively easy to imagine him standing in for Madame Defarge and condemning various Goldman Sachs execs to the guillotine.  Far-fetched?  Just know that Taibbi fantasized about the creation of a “Guillotine Channel” that would broadcast the beheadings of corporate media moguls in his 2003 book, Spanking the Donkey.  Or read some of his less mainstream writings, such as his pieces for The Exiled, an online magazine initially intended for American ex-pats living in Russia that Taibbi co-founded in 1997 (as editor, Taibbi regularly engaged in dehumanizing practical jokes, such as throwing a cream pie made of equine sperm into the face of a New York Times reporter).  Given all this, it’s no surprise that the corporate villains Taibbi describes—even in some of his more mainstream articles—don’t sound much like people at all; rabble-rousing doesn’t generally lend itself particularly well to nuanced portrayals of the individuals being targeted.

This backdrop is part of what makes J.C. Chandor’s 2011 Wall Street drama Margin Call so refreshing.  Rather than painting the tycoons who plunged the world into financial crisis in 2008 as sub-human caricatures of evil, he paints them as exceedingly human figures.  And his approach ends up being far more compelling than caricature on a number of levels.  First, because the characters are portrayed as having actual human consciences (which they repeatedly ignore), they are more culpable for their actions than if they were sub-human “vampire squid” who had no choice but to follow their evil instincts.  Second, it allows viewers to ask themselves, “What would I have done in their shoes?”  For instance, Stanley Tucci’s risk manager Eric Dale is portrayed as one of the few people with the courage to stand up to his firm’s questionable practices.  Yet when the day comes for his firm to pawn off its toxic assets to unsuspecting buyers, Dale is on hand to lend his tacit approval.  When a surprised corporate executive says to him, “I didn’t think they were going to be able to get you back here,” Dale’s reply is, “Well, they told me they were going to drag me through hell on everything over the next two years: my options, my health care.  Or I could come back here and make $176,471 an hour to sit quietly in this room.  It didn’t seem like much of a choice.”  Even someone like me—someone who looks at this situation and sees Tucci’s character as definitely wrong for taking the money to keep quiet while his firm fleeces an unknowing public—would be hard pressed to turn down $176,471 an hour.

All through its brisk 107 minutes, Margin Call answers the question most people were asking in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, “How could they do this?”  The answer to that question is different for everyone involved.  And it is in Chandor’s understanding of these different answers that his personal intimacy with Wall Street—his father was a Merrill Lynch trader for over thirty years—is most essential.  For Tucci’s Eric Dale, the answer is simple: money.  Jeremy Irons’ CEO rests on the mantra, “I never cheat,” meaning his only moral guideline is the letter of the law, which—given the malleability with which he interprets the laws regulating his industry—is an obvious copout.  Far more convincing is the rationalization of Paul Bettany’s senior trader.  He sees himself as merely an enabler of “real people” and their over-leveraged lifestyles.  According to his logic, deep down inside everyone knows that they are living beyond their means, and his job is simply to help them foster the illusion of affluence.  “If people want to live like this with their cars and their big fucking houses they can’t even pay for, then [Wall Street] is necessary.”  If the market takes a turn for the worse?  “Fuck ‘em.  Fuck normal people.”  According to Bettany, they’ve made their own beds.  One of the disquieting results of watching Margin Call is having to come to terms with our own complicity in what has happened over the last three years.  Even so, Bettany’s character is certainly not as innocent as he would like to believe.  The movie makes it pretty clear that if “real people” were indeed playing hazardously with a loaded weapon, it was Wall Street that pulled the trigger.

To his credit, Chandor avoids the moralizing of heavy-handed documentaries like Inside Job.  Instead, he puts viewers in the shoes of a few Wall Street executives and lets them draw their own conclusions about the characters’ rationalizations.  And he does so via a smart, taut, suspenseful film that is reminiscent of the classic Glengarry Glen Ross.  The acting and screenplay are so compelling that Margin Call—like Glengarry Glen Ross—would have worked on the stage as well as on screen.  Given the all-star cast the film attracted on a limited budget (Margin Call cost less than $4 million to make), it is clear the actors recognized the strength of the script as well.

So why wasn’t this movie a blockbuster?  Why isn’t it getting more Oscar buzz?  Even though it received mostly positive reviews—The New York Times’ A.O. Scott called it an “extraordinary feat of filmmaking” and The New Yorker’s David Denby called it “the best Wall Street movie ever made”—it failed to capture the public’s imagination.  Margin Call has been in theatres since October, yet it has only grossed $5 million domestically and $10 million worldwide (for a point of reference, the most recent Transformers film has grossed $1,124 million worldwide).  Why is this?  At least part of the answer can be found in the reviews of the movie’s detractors.

According to the Village Voice’s Melissa Anderson, the movie is too out-of-step with the anger of the Occupy Wall Street types; she says Margin Call makes the mistake of “bid[ding] for sympathy for its most conflicted character, [Kevin] Spacey’s Sam.”  This is, in fact, completely untrue.  Far from being a sympathetic character, Spacey’s Sam Rogers is portrayed as an absolute wuss.  He has very human pangs of conscience, but he never listens to them.  Even though he knows his firm’s reliance on questionable mortgages is dangerously risky, he fails to stop the practice.  Even though he has moral qualms about knowingly selling worthless assets to unsuspecting buyers, he does it anyway.  Even when he is so disgusted by his own actions that he wants to quit the firm, he agrees to stay on for two additional years and help with damage control because he “need[s] the money.”  At every turn, he chooses to follow the wishes of the firm—while repeatedly lining his own wallet—against the misgivings of his own conscience.  But apparently, the fact that he has a conscience at all is more credit than Andersen wants to give him.  After all, if he had a conscience, Andersen would have to treat him like a human, not dismiss him as a sub-human breed of “rapacious capitalist.”

Most telling, though, is the review of Margin Call in the Matt Taibbi-founded online magazine The Exiled.  According to Yasha Levine, “You may have heard positive things about Margin Call, a new bankster suspense drama loosely based on the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers.  I just saw the film, and my advice: Don’t waste your time and cash, not unless you want to spend a Jackson and 107 valuable minutes of your life hate-watching poorly scripted/directed banker-propaganda that tries to make you believe that, despite their obvious flaws and all, deep down those Wall Street bankers are complex human beings, just like you and me.”  The clear—and dangerous—assumption is that “Wall Street bankers” are sub-human.  This sentiment permeates the review, which goes on to criticize the idea that, “deep down Wall Street bankers are just like the 99% of us.”  It ends with a dismissal of the idea that, “Rich evil banker fucks have hearts, too.”  Thanks in large part to Taibbi’s crossover success, similar sentiments are gaining traction in more mainstream outlets as well (albeit much more politely).  The Boston Globe’s Wesley Morris says that Margin Call is an “attempt to humanize a social class that a swelling segment of the population is currently devoting a great deal of its time to protest.”  But according to Morris, the only people who will be able to “recognize something of themselves” in the film’s humanization attempt are those in “the financial industry.”  “For everyone else,” he says, “anyone craving an outraged film meant to stir outrage in us—there’s Charles Ferguson’s volcanic documentary indictment, the Oscar-winning Inside Job.”

Sadly, I suspect that this is why Margin Call failed to catch on.  Outrage outsells nuance; people are far more interested in “an outraged film meant to stir outrage in us” than they are in a measured look at the very human emotions, decisions, and rationalizations that actually caused this financial mess.  It’s much simpler to simply blame the rich for being rich.  Even though there are many Occupy sympathizers interested in fixing the system’s mammoth structural shortcomings, the slogan “We are the 99%” ignores the treachery, deviousness, or criminal behavior that led to the meltdown and instaed condemns the richest 1% Americans according only to the size of their bank accounts.  Do we really want to draw the line along between “us” and “them” according only to wealth?  Surely not everyone in the wealthiest 1% is evil by definition.  And surely there were a lot of villains in 2008 who failed to make enough money to crack that infamous 1%.  Shouldn’t the rallying cry against those villains have more to do with fairness, ethics, and legality than it does a simplistic measure of wealth?  As Margin Call points out, each player in the 2008 collapse was unique: different motives, different justifications, different levels of culpability, different sized bank accounts.  Is it too much to hope for laws that would indict and punish all of them according to their individual crimes?  That would require a government willing to create, rescind, and enforce the proper laws, which brings us to perhaps the most unfortunate effect of the ongoing scapegoating of the rich: the dehumanizing outrage at corporate big-wigs fostered by the likes of Taibbi and Ferguson will be a key ingredient in the class warfare rhetoric that will surely mark the 2012 political season.  And in an ironic twist, that rhetoric will be one of the many tactics used to distract our government—and the voters who empower it—from actually addressing a broken financial system that sorely needs fixing.