• About Us
  • Advertising on Awards Daily
Sunday, December 10, 2023
  • Login
  • Register
No Result
View All Result
Awardsdaily
  • Home
  • Good As Gold
  • AD TV
  • Predictions Contests
  • Oscars Calendar 2024
  • Podcasts
  • Interviews
  • Follow us on Twitter
    • Awards Daily
    • Sasha Stone
    • Ryan Adams
    • Clarence Moye
    • Mark Johnson
  • All News
  • Home
  • Good As Gold
  • AD TV
  • Predictions Contests
  • Oscars Calendar 2024
  • Podcasts
  • Interviews
  • Follow us on Twitter
    • Awards Daily
    • Sasha Stone
    • Ryan Adams
    • Clarence Moye
    • Mark Johnson
  • All News
No Result
View All Result
Awardsdaily
No Result
View All Result

Kevin Spacey and Zachary Quinto in Margin Call

by Sasha Stone
October 24, 2011
in ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
20

Last year Roadside Attractions brought us Winter’s Bone and Biutiful. This year they’re handling distribution for Albert Nobbs, Project Nim, and this weekend deliver the biggest under-the-radar surprise of the month. Margin Call opened in limited release just a few days after being nominated for Best Ensemble by the Gotham Awards. Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, Penn Badgley, Simon Baker, Mary McDonnell, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci, Aasif Mandvi. It’s showing in 56 theaters. Trust me, it’s worth driving quite a distance to find one of those theaters. The New Yorker’s David Denby says it’s “easily the best Wall Street movie ever made.”

In “Margin Call,” the executives working late at an imperiled investment firm in Manhattan stand in an office tower and stare at the lights and the streets below, wondering if the great city isn’t a dream. The movie is a fictionalized account of a disastrous twenty-four hours in 2008, when “financial instruments” that had seemed solid dissolved into air. The rush of panic is halted, now and then, by moments of disbelief. Earlier in the movie, two of the company’s young analysts, sitting in the back of a Lincoln Town Car, look out at the people walking by and marvel at how little they comprehend of what is about to hit them. As visual and verbal rhetoric, the awe-inspiring appearance of Manhattan at night and the moods of choking anxiety aren’t terribly fresh, but the writing and the acting in “Margin Call” are so good that we get completely caught up.

When the investment guys ask if we’re aware of what’s happening, we look at them and ask the same thing. What were people like this thinking? How could men and women paid fortunes for their judgment have continued, as late as 2008, to package, repackage, and sell billions of dollars in bonds backed by subprime mortgages? Our sense of the unreality of their enterprise is far greater than their wonder at our innocence…

“Margin Call” is one of the strongest American films of the year and easily the best Wall Street movie ever made. It’s about corporate manners—the protocols of hierarchy, the rituals of power, and, most of all, the difficulty of confronting flagrant habits of speculation with truth. That moment is avoided until it’s absolutely necessary, at which point communication among the responsible parties becomes exceptionally nasty. The young writer-director, J. C. Chandor, has made documentaries and commercials, but he’s never had a script produced before, and this is his first feature as a director. Chandor’s only obvious qualification is that his father spent forty years at Merrill Lynch, which, like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, destroyed itself with an excess of mortgage-backed securities and finally, in 2008, subsided, at a bargain rate, into the arms of a wealthier firm. Chandor is a beginner, but, to my ears, the terse, generally understated, yet sometimes barbarously rude language feels exactly right. I would guess that he has studied David Mamet’s work, digesting the dramatic value of repetition and silence in, say, “Glengarry Glen Ross,” along with the play’s stunned outrage and the characters’ strangely displaced, almost disembodied reactions as some appalling reality swings into view.

Chandor’s prickly script attracted a talented cast. … He has worked out what all these people think of one another while keeping the drama steadily moving forward—no easy job—and if there’s a false note or an overwrought scene in “Margin Call” I couldn’t find it. Chandor has just enough camera technique to do what he needs to do. In this largely indoor movie, the city looming outside is a palpable presence; the camera, quiet and relentless in moments of confrontation, tracks silently at night through the empty trading floor, a ghost invading a once healthy company.

…Spacey, after a long career of playing acidulous bad guys, gives a performance of surprising gentleness. As Rogers, sleepless, makes a speech to his traders in the morning, prepping them for the unsavory task ahead, Spacey’s body slumps and his facial muscles go slack. Will Rogers walk out on Tuld? In “Margin Call,” money insistently pushes its way into personal decisions; the movie is sympathetic to the executives’ plight but hard-nosed about their constant desire to elevate pay packages over principle.

No one ever says as much, but, of course, the toxic assets were assembled in the first place, and were sold well past the danger point, because the fees from doing so were high enough to extinguish caution. Until the last moment, the smugly reckless top executives don’t even comprehend the firm’s exposure; they need the fledglings, peering into computer models, to explain it to them (not an exaggeration of what happened at several firms). If Wall Street executives find themselves at a loss to understand what the protesters outside are getting at, they could do worse than watch this movie for a few clues.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • WhatsApp
  • Print
Tags: Best Original ScreenplayKevin SpaceyMarginZachary Quinto
Sasha Stone

Sasha Stone

Sasha Stone has been around the Oscar scene since 1999. Almost everything on this website is her fault.

Related Posts

Actor in a Leading Role – Good As Gold

‘Rustin’ Co-Writer Julian Breece On Bringing To Vivid Life the Unspoken Story Of Bayard Rustin

by Clarence Moye
November 17, 2023
0

Screenwriter Julian Breece spent nearly a decade crafting the story of civil rights advocate Bayard Rustin to the screen. It...

‘Mass’ Writer/Director Fran Kranz On How We All Need to Heal After a Great Tragedy

‘Mass’ Writer/Director Fran Kranz On How We All Need to Heal After a Great Tragedy

by Joey Moser
January 31, 2022
1

It's shocking to me that Mass is Fran Kranz's directorial debut. There is a reason that we have been talking...

Big Splashy Look at Big Oscar Movie The Trial of the Chicago 7

‘Chicago 7’ Cast Reflects on Aaron Sorkin’s Screenwriting Talents

by Clarence Moye
February 5, 2021
0

Aaron Sorkin received three Academy Award nominations for screenwriting, winning for his brilliant screenplay for David Fincher's The Social Network....

A Sneak Peek at Disney / Pixar’s Upcoming ‘Soul’

Five Questions With… Disney/Pixar ‘Soul’ Screenwriter Mike Jones

by Clarence Moye
February 21, 2021
17

Those following the film industry may know Mike Jones from his tenures at IndieWire, Variety, and other publications. But a...

Tristan Versluis Renders Brutal Reality of War Via Prosthetics in ‘1917’

Five Questions With… ‘1917’ Screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns

by Clarence Moye
December 27, 2019
0

Writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns and director Sam Mendes initially bonded over a handful of projects that ultimately never made it to...

The Best Screenplays of the Year So Far

The Best Screenplays of the Year So Far

by Sasha Stone
November 17, 2019
124

The trend lately has been for directors at the top of the Oscar race to either write or co-write their...

Next Post

A Dangerous Method Hits the London Film Fest

Chris Messina on Playing the Most Notorious Sports Agent of All Time in Ben Affleck’s ‘Air’

Chris Messina on Playing the Most Notorious Sports Agent of All Time in Ben Affleck’s ‘Air’

December 8, 2023
Oscars 2024: Teaser for ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Drops

2024 Oscar Predictions — Killers of the Flower Moon Becomes the Best Picture Frontrunner

December 8, 2023
Television Publicity Executives Committee (TPEC) Announces the 2nd Annual TPEC Awards

Television Publicity Executives Committee (TPEC) Announces the 2nd Annual TPEC Awards

December 8, 2023
Oscars 2024: Teaser for ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Drops

2024 Oscar Predictions — Killers of the Flower Moon Becomes the Best Picture Frontrunner

by Sasha Stone
December 8, 2023
96

Predicting the Oscars is not about finding the best — it is about finding the consensus. If you can predict...

2023 NYFCC Contest Winner!

Killers, Oppenheimer and Poor Things Dominate Chicago Film Critics Nominations

by Sasha Stone
December 8, 2023
20

The Chicago Film Critics have announced their nominations. Winners will be announced on December 12. Here is the press release:...

Oscar-Nominee Paul Giamatti On How ‘The Holdovers’ Paul Potentially Echoes ‘Sideways’ Miles [VIDEO]

Oscar-Nominee Paul Giamatti On How ‘The Holdovers’ Paul Potentially Echoes ‘Sideways’ Miles [VIDEO]

by Clarence Moye
December 8, 2023
0

It's incredibly difficult to believe that Paul Giamatti, one of the most ubiquitous and beloved actors of the 21st century,...

Oscars 2024: Visual Effects Finalists Announced

Oscars 2024: Visual Effects Finalists Announced

by Sasha Stone
December 7, 2023
33

Variety's Clayton Davis got the exclusive. 20 films in competition for Visual Effects. Most surprising is George Clooney's The Boys...

First Trailer for ‘Oppenheimer’ Has Arrived

AFI Announces Top Ten Films of 2024

by Sasha Stone
December 7, 2023
100

AFI MOTION PICTURES OF THE YEAR AMERICAN FICTION BARBIE THE HOLDOVERS KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON MAESTRO MAY DECEMBER OPPENHEIMER...

‘Poor Things’ Willem Dafoe Avoids Mad Scientist Clichés For Yorgos Lanthimos’s Acclaimed Film [VIDEO]

‘Poor Things’ Willem Dafoe Avoids Mad Scientist Clichés For Yorgos Lanthimos’s Acclaimed Film [VIDEO]

by Clarence Moye
December 7, 2023
1

Four-time Academy Award nominee Willem Dafoe returns to screens this month in Yorgos Lanthimos's acclaimed film Poor Things. No matter...

AwardsDaily Crew

  • About Us
  • Sasha Stone
  • Editor Ryan Adams
  • Editor Clarence Moye
  • Editor Mark Johnson
  • Contact Us

ADTV Crew

  • ADTV Home
  • Megan McLachlan, Editor
  • Joey Moser, Editor
  • Clarence Moye, Editor
  • Jalal Haddad, Senior Contributor
  • Shadan Larki
  • Ben Morris
  • David Phillips
  • Advertising on Awards Daily
  • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Oscar Podcast
  • AwardsDailyTV

© 2023 JNews - Premium WordPress news & magazine theme by Jegtheme.

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Good As Gold
  • AD TV
  • Predictions Contests
  • Oscars Calendar 2024
  • Podcasts
  • Interviews
  • Follow us on Twitter
    • Awards Daily
    • Sasha Stone
    • Ryan Adams
    • Clarence Moye
    • Mark Johnson
  • All News

© 2023 JNews - Premium WordPress news & magazine theme by Jegtheme.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password? Sign Up

Create New Account!

Fill the forms below to register

All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In