criterionforum.org

Anybody seen this yet? The glowing NY Times review says it opened nationwide on 10/21, but it's certainly not playing anywhere near my neck of the woods. Perhaps it'll open in larger circulation soon, because I really want to see this.

A.O. Scott's review

[T]he film, relentless in its honesty and shrewd in its insights and techniques, is unlikely to soothe the wounded pride of the actual or aspiring ruling class. It is a tale of greed, vanity, myopia and expediency that is all the more damning for its refusal to moralize.

And The Atlantic has a positive review.

Chandor's film is among the best of the year to date, a fable of global financial calamity distilled down to an intimate microcosm of human greed and frailty.

I read the script a long time ago expecting to hate it but, instead, I couldn't put it down, shocked at how much I liked it.
I've often wondered if I'll like the film itself as much, especially now that the initial surprise is gone. Plus, that's a lot of actors who are, well, kind of past their prime, to put it kindly.

I saw this today. It is shockingly good. A pleasant surprise to be sure.

With so many actors who might be tempted to try to upstage one another, I was stunned at how restrained and impeccably portrayed each character was. This is displayed early-ish in the movie when Jeremy's Iron shows up.

The "mystery" isn't played as suspense. Instead, it is more of a study of how different people in the finance world might react in the situation they were in. Smartly, we are given a full range of people in the finance world--peons to kings--so blame isn't pinned on one type of person. Also, the crisis really is humanized through the characters. So, we get a more nuanced understanding of how something like the financial collapse could have happened instead of the easy "these guys were greedy pricks" explanation we see almost everywhere else.

This really is an excellent film. And yes, although it's superficially a thriller, we know what's about to happen, and so the film uses this "suspense" precisely to examine how the people most complicit are either a) clueless as to the actual nuts and bolts of what they're doing, or b) willing to compromise their moral compasses (to the extent that they have them) because the money's too good.

Margin Call is everything that Wall Street 2 wishes it could be, but never approaches in its wildest dreams. Overall, the former avoids the irritating didacticism that plagues the latter, and it's buoyed by excellent performances all around. Despite my sympathy for and/or identification with several characters, the film doesn't let them off the hook for their moral turpitude. It's pretty impressive that such a film takes such easy and obvious villains and steadfastly refuses to vilify them, at least in the way we expect.

Ultimately the film's a little too lowkey to have much chance of resonating in the memory, but the quiet defeatism of the business world the characters find themselves within is probably the strongest thing here, with money and "options" ultimately ruling higher than any internal moral compass. I also thought the film shined when it attempted to work against the anti-Wall Street image it automatically projects (with or against its will, well, that's debatable), such as in Bettany's killer little speech blaming "normal people" for the crisis.

I just saw this on Netflix Streaming. I was about to give it a B, or 3 stars...

Spoiler

And then the ending came. Still digging and then cutting to black gave me a very sudden uneasy feeling about Spacey's character. You just know it's not going to end well for him.

So a definite B+ or 3 and a half stars at least, from me.

I've watched this a couple more times since, and now in my estimation it'll probably go down as one of my favorites of this decade.