Just when you thought it passe, another movie about Wall Street is coming your way in October — “Margin Call” staring Keven Stacey, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, Demi Moore and others too numerous to mention.
The movie reviews from a showing at the Sundance Festival have been less than glowing. Not since “Repo Man” (which unfortunately was not about a guy running a match book in 10 year notes) has there been this much anticipation. It might just mean it is field trip time for the securities financing community. We’ll buy the popcorn!
From the Wall Street Journal:
A different kind of Wall Street movie, its ensemble cast includes Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Demi Moore, Paul Bettany, Simon Baker and Stanley Tucci, among others, yet it cost just $3.5 million to make. Nobody gets taken away in handcuffs. And making money is portrayed without sermons on greed, good and evil—but plenty of drama.
Maintaining that moral ambiguity was so crucial for first-time feature director J.C. Chandor that he turned down an offer to finance the film in the summer of 2009, at the height of the credit crisis, because it was contingent upon his revising the script to include a perp-walk scene. That was “the exact story I didn’t want to tell,” says Mr. Chandor, who attributes his feel for the nuances and workings of Wall Street to his father, a longtime executive at Merrill Lynch.
Shot mostly inside a Manhattan office building, the movie depicts a harrowing night at a 107-year-old investment bank, where—thanks to alarming calculations by a math-whiz junior associate played by Zachary Quinto—managers must take decisive action to save their firm from ruin, but at potentially great cost to everyone.
Here is a link to the trailer