Susan and I saw Margin Call on Saturday night.  The movie has a great cast, including Jeremy Irons, Kevin Spacey and one of my personal favorites, Paul Bettany.  My theory is that the more you know about finance, the more you will have trouble enjoying this movie.  That’s because Margin Call gets some finance language and mechanics wrong including in a very early scene where Eric Dale, played by the always fun to watch Stanley Tucci, gets fired.  The HR rep says to him “of course you get to keep your *unvested* options” which should almost certainly have been “vested” and even there would have likely been some need to exercise those options.  From observing the audience a bit it was pretty clear that the majority did not pick up on these finance errors.

Margin Call’s strength is that it remains strictly hero less.  Leaving out a couple of minor outside scenes, we only observe people working inside a large fictitious financial firm which is at least partially based on Lehman (including the CEO’s name John Tuld, played by Jeremy Irons, in an overly obvious reference to Lehman’s Dick Fuld).  None of these insiders makes a meaningful attempt to stop the firm’s actions and any hesitation is based more on personal career concerns (ability to be active in the market in the future) than really taking responsibility.  

Within that, Margin actually manages to provide a range of characters that are semi credible.  There is Zachary Quinto’s Peter Sullivan, the young quant jock (ex rocket scientist) for whom the math seems more interesting than the morals.  There is Demi Moore’s Sarah Robertson the lone female executive who early on realizes that it will be her head on the chopping block (an echo of Lehman’s Erin Callan).  Since I like Bettany it wasn’t surprising that I most enjoyed his Will Emerson, a hedonistic bachelor who seems supremely cynical yet has his bosses back at a key moment.

Margin Call is at its best when these different characters are interacting in a natural way and at its worst when it sets up didactic dialog.  [Spoiler alert] An example of the former is the eventual firing of Sarah Robertson (Moore) by John Tuld (Irons).  An example of the latter is a scene in which Eric Dale (Tucci) is picked up in Brooklyn by Will Emerson (Bettany) and goes on too long about a bridge he built in his former life as an engineer.

All told, Margin Call didn’t work for me as a “suspension of disbelief” kind of movie (because of the finance mistakes), but it was a solid outing in what Schiller called the “theater as a moral institution” – in fact the movie is reminiscent of a play.  I left Margin Call thinking about what system it might be that I am compromisingly participating in despite knowing about its deep problems.  More on that in my upcoming review of Larry Lessig’s new book “Republic, Lost.”