Dir. J. C. Chandor, US, 2011,106 mins
Cast: Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Zachary Quinto, Jeremy Irons
Review by Carol Allen
This film marks the arrival of a talented new writer/director in J. C. Chandor. There has now been a considerable number of film and theatre pieces that have taken the often tricky to understand financial disasters of the last few years as the basis for drama. This is one of the most successful. It is totally gripping.
The specific subject is the 2008 crisis precipitated initially on Wall Street by the trading in toxic debt. The concept of selling debt is a somewhat baffling one to the outsider but Chandor, whose father worked for many years for the financial institution Merrill Lynch, knows his way round that world and has the gift of making it clear to outsiders, largely by engaging us with his characters.
Set for most of its length in the offices of a fictionalManhattaninvestment bank over a 24 hour period, the film opens with a chilling “night (or rather afternoon) of the long knives” in which some 80% of the staff is “culled”. One of them is Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), who before he is evicted ruthlessly from the building passes on the project on which he’s been working to young risk analyst Peter Sullivan (Quinto). When Sullivan puts the pieces together, he realises that disaster is about to strike and the bank is in imminent danger of being wiped out. Then follows a night of panic, when Sullivan alerts his immediate boss, Will Emmerson (Bettany), Will’s superior, the world weary and morally conflicted Sam Rogers (Spacey), and on to Sam’s bosses, Jared Cohen (Simon Baker) and the only woman Sarah Robertson (Demi Moore). Until the buck finally stops with the man at the top John Tuld (Irons), superbly smooth, urbane and totally ruthless, who arrives by helicopter likes some “deus ex machina” and makes the choice that they all see as inevitable – action to ensure their survival, whatever the cost to other people’s lives, before the rest of Wall Street realises that financial disaster is about to strike their world. “We have no choice”, they keep bleating. It’s a jungle where the animals wear expensive suits and earn millions – a subject of intense interest to Sullivan’s young co-worker Seth (Penn Badgley), who is on a mere $500,000 compared to Will’s two and a half million and Tuld’s eight billion. “It can’t be right”, ponders Sullivan, a former engineer, who was himself seduced into the financial world by the fact that the pay is “more attractive”.
The cleverness of Chandor’s script is that these are not black hearted villains – merely self interested human beings, who are running scared in a situation created by the greed of their profession. Implicit in the film but never getting in the way of the action is a philosophical debate on the morality and inevitable consequences of the capitalist system itself. One of the useful ironies of the film is that the higher someone is in the financial food chain, the less he understands about what the bank is actually doing. “Put it in plain English”, they keep saying, which is useful for us, the audience.
The fact that we see little of the characters outside of that enclosed office environment adds to the claustrophobic impact of the drama. The frantic phone calls and middle of the night meetings generate more tension than any stand off or gunplay in a gangster movie.
This is a remarkably accomplished film – beautifully structure and characterized, well paced and skilfully directed, while Frank G DeMarco’s cinematography gives the film a moody yet glossy look, appropriate to the subject and the lifestyle of the characters. With the film making talent he demonstrates here, it is not perhaps so surprising that J.C. Chandor managed to gather such a distinguished team for his first feature. This is a brilliant piece of work.
xx - posted on 23/05/2012 13:13:28
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