Margin Call.

Margin Call jumped on my radar when the late, lamented Yahoo! blog The Projector gave it a glowing review back in October, and then named it their must-see movie of the week a fortnight afterwards. Featuring an absurdly deep cast, the film follows an investment bank or hedge fund heavily exposed to CMOs during a 24-hour period right at the start of the U.S. housing market meltdown. It features no violence, no sex, no weapons drawn, no manufactured drama, and is entirely gripping from the moment a junior analyst (played by Zachary Quinto, whose production firm financed the film) discovers that his employer is, in effect, bankrupt.

Quinto plays Peter Sullivan, a former engineering student turned financial analyst whose boss, Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), is fired in the opening scenes after 17 years at the company. Dale hands Sullivan a flash drive with an unfinished spreadsheet on it that he indicates is important – and it is, as Sullivan discovers, dragging his new boss Will Emerson (Paul Bettany) back into the office at 10 pm to point out that the firm’s portfolio has it on the verge of collapse. Emerson goes to his boss, the depressed, disgruntled Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), who takes it to his boss, the amoral Jared Cohen (Simon Baker), who eventually calls in the head of the firm, played by Jeremy Irons (I told you the cast was strong) as if this was an updated work of Shakespeare and he is both the play’s central figure and its empty conscience.

Margin Call‘s central energy source is that one bit of knowledge – that the market is close to a panic, and such a drop in the housing market would drive this unnamed firm out of business – which it uses to power all of its characters, allowing us to sit back and watch their reactions. There’s no gotcha moment, no twist of a bit of unknown information revealed in the final scene to change the film’s direction; most of the movie takes place overnight, when U.S. markets are closed and thus can’t move. This movie is about the reactions of professionals with widely varying backgrounds, loyalties, and years of experience in the industry, and how they move in response to the news that the empire they built is crumbling, and that saving it will hurt others, and could even cause a wider financial panic. It’s not quite a character study, as we don’t stay with any one character long enough to give him/her sufficient depth, but a characters study, almost like witnessing a sociological experiment.

It felt to me far more like a great play than a typical movie – or perhaps more like a British film than an American one, with an emphasis on dialogue and interactions to move the story forward rather than exogenous events inserted by the writer(s). Irons’ arguments with Spacey, who seems to be growing a conscience or merely working harder to suppress it, Bettany’s conversation with the seemingly-principled Tucci, and Quinto’s vaguely comic-relief chatter with a younger colleague played by Penn Badgley had me hanging on their words, not just for their import to the story but to how they were structured and delivered. There is, of course, a message about greed, and the disconnect such traders felt with the owners of the mortgages they swapped and sold without regard to the effects on those ‘regular’ people; I also thought the dog symbolized the soul or conscience of its owner (saying more would spoil it). But I was far more wrapped up in the intensity of the conversations, the emotional reactions to the news coming down the wire, and the way characters rationalized their actions to themselves than I was in the larger themes the film might have wanted to express. It had slow moments, including a long ramp-up to the handoff of the flash drive that kicks off the main plot, and some less effective subplots (including Demi Moore, delivering little in an empty role other than appearing in the hackneyed “sitting sideways on window bench overlooking Manhattan” shot), but as a fan of simple, cerebral dramas, I found more than enough strengths to overcome some slight choppiness of the script.