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Margin Call Review

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My movie review of Margin Call for Brightest Young Things.

Margin Call is essentially the fiction counterpart to the scathing documentary condemnation of Wall Street hubris, Inside Job. Err, except that it is actually based on all too chillingly real story—48 hours in the life of a investment firm during the 2008 meltdown. In that sense, the tension is psychological but no less thrilling, and unlike Wall Street and Boiler Room, it does away with the aggrandization of the macho-centric “old boy network” and slicked-back-hair-swagger of the financial world. J.C. Chandor’s debut, featuring a star cast including Kevin Spacey, Stanley Tucci, Demi Moore, and Jeremy Irons, attempts to humanize what are essentially two-dimensional caricatures in the public consciousness—the Wall Street “fat cats” and their trader underling whiz kids. It’s a film that raises more questions than it answers, as it should be—it’s a trenchant commentary on the nebulousness of the word accountability and morality or right or wrong in the paper world of money–literally.

Zachary Quinto plays a young risk management wonk, with a Ph.D. in rocket science no less, who, after some late-night number crunching, “discovers” that the firm is leveraged beyond historical limits and that at current market volatility levels, it is looking to incur losses greater than its value. The big guns are called in, including the CEO [played with appropriate Euro-trash bluster by Jeremy Irons] who literally helicopters in to weigh in with the decision on how to offload the toxic assets pronto. Kevin Spacey turns in a spectacular performance as a world-weary trading floor boss on who falls the burden of doing the dirty job of selling worthless instruments. His character in particular is extremely interesting and nuanced—he resists management’s “sell something worth nothing” plan not from a moral high ground but from the perspective of a veteran salesman—“We are not in the business of selling. We are in the business of buying and selling. And we only sell stuff that we know people will come back for. No one will trust us again.” In his amoral, strange, yet stoically samurai-esque way, he has loyalty to the firm—not its CEOs and not the market. He is also not oblivious to the cut-throat nature of their business—after a particularly brutal lay-off of 80% of his traders, he advises the ones left behind that their co-workers are “not to be thought of again.” His exchange with Quinto’s character on whether selling the assets is “the right thing to do” really encapsulates the message of the whole film–“For whom?” “I am not sure.” “Neither am I.”

Margin Call deserves credit for shining a light on a really broad scope of the Wall Street milieu. For example, the firing of Sarah Robertson, Demi Moore’s risk management character, while her male counterpart stayed on hinted at the chauvinistic nature of the business. The dialogue between the junior staff about their being glorified computer junkies and about this being a game of “one guy wins, one guy loses,” as well as the “f*** normal people” nihilistic ethos of the business was nicely and subtly portrayed. The CEO’s assertion that it “wasn’t brains that got [him] here” were a cheeky comment on the current discourse on the Wall Street fat cats. The hookers-and-blow excess also added a realistic touch to the picture.

Considering that we are still in the midst of the economic quagmire that Margin Call alludes to, the film nicely manages to avoid running into the “too soon” category. No Ph.D. in Economics required, it aptly presents the situation for what it is—with no easy answers, while steering clear of the blatant and vapid money-worship of older financial thrillers like Wall Street. The characters are fallible and complex—some are American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman-esque, some, like Kevin Spacey’s character, are downright likable. In other words, it takes the fairly dehumanized version of the investment banker bad guy and at least attempts to explore him, even though humanization, redemption, or understanding is not exactly easy to come by either.

Reviews

DC Muslim Film Fest 2011

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DC Muslim Film Fest 2011

The Muslim Film Festival held in Washington, D.C. from April 19th to 27th, 2011 and organized by the American Islamic Congress and Project Nur presents a diverse group of five films under the general rubric of Generation: Muslim. Considering the fact that an estimated 65% of the world Muslim population is under the age of 30, the films embody a youthful, vibrant ethos and offer a glimpse into a world that is quite removed from the plucked-from-the-headlines “angry young Arab man” stereotype—simply put, they show that subversive is not equal to “angry mob.” The protagonists in the films break dance, play in indie rock bands, paint graffiti, throw punk rock shows and, in general, provide quite refreshing, nuanced, and trenchant answers to the question of what it means to be a Muslim. To an audience bombarded with images of the Islamic world’s troubled relationship with Western culture, the Muslim Film Festival paints a picture of diversity and narrates how Islam fits and lives within the social fabric of Western settings.

The 2009 Cannes Film Festival Special Jury Prize selection No One Knows About Persian Cats explores the difficulties Iranian youth face in trying to produce and perform rock music—it’s a breathless expose on a cat-and-mouse game but the movie does not take on a fatalistic, cynical view of that. If anything, it shows that even under repressive regimes, there is such a strong undercurrent of creativity—case in point, Iran has metal and indie rock bands, too, and even Sufi musicians who have to record their music underground.

The Tunisian Making Of is an interesting meta-approach-taking film-within-a-film about the making of a film about the radicalization of youth. It frames in a rather innovative way the question of just how that could take place.

The 2010 Oscar Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film Un Prophete, screening on Wednesday, April 27, is a tour-de-force thriller of a young Muslim man’s experience in a French prison and his alliance with the Corsican mob.

The 2010 Sundance Film Festival selection The Taqwacores, directed by Eyad Zahra, depicts the electrifying underground subculture of Muslim punk-rockers in Buffalo, NY. Based on the Michael Muhammad Knight’s 2003 cult novel The Taqwacores, the movie does an incredible job of portraying the ultimate in-your-face punch of the mashing of two “counter-mainstream-cultural,” if you will, phenomena—being punk and being Muslim in America. Zahra’s direction is superb in showing us that the characters in the movie are not on some contrived faux-rebellion tip against society—if anything, they are simply living only as they know how and accepting in a sort of resigned, almost cynical way that simply being who they are by definition makes them subversive. As the pink-mohawked guitarist Jehangir (Dominic Rains) puts it, he is the embodiment of “mismatching of disenfranchised subcultures.”

In addition to the absolutely stunning cinematography [the movie’s cadence is really unique and true to its ’80s zine-punk aesthetic], the cast of characters is thrilling to watch—there is shy Yusef (Bobby Naderi), an engineering student, ever- angry, moral-enforcing straight-edger Umar (Nav Mann), and Rabeya (Noureen DeWulf), a burqa-wearing feminist-of-sorts, whose attire baffles even her roommates but who Jehangir simply sums up as “must be the kind of girl who reads in a burqa.” When Jehangir decides to put on a punk show, hosting Muslim punk bands from “Khalifornia,” [the soundtrack of the movie features those real bands, btw], things get ugly in a good and bad [punk] sense. The Taqwacores is also full of clever, funny dialogue such as Jehangir’s description of the chastity battle as a “jihad against my nuts.” Ultimately, the theme is that even through the rebellion and struggle, there is an ever present thread of faith and spirituality–“Allah is too big and too open for my Islam to be small and closed.”

Director Eyad Zahra commented that, “I was not certain that this film would be ‘Islamically-accepted’ but there has been no negative response to it. It has seen nothing but good.” If there is any message, he expounded, it is that “the Muslim community is wide and diverse.” The paradigm of “big tent” underscores the very pluralistic nature of Islam and the DC Muslim Film Fest’s film selections showcase both the struggles and triumphs of being Muslim in a modern context. The take-away message from the Festival was that through the struggle of defining one’s identity in a subcultural vs. mainstream sense and even with the difficulty of discrimination and repression, the “performance” of a Muslim identity takes many different forms and in the process raises a series of incredibly interesting questions.