Margin Call (2011)

What I keep thinking about with this movie is that I wish Kevin Spacey and Stanley Tucci had switched roles. Spacey’s good, don’t get me wrong, but, I don’t know, I just think he could have done a bit more with the role. And that’s minor complaint for a really intriguing movie.

Margin Call flashes back to the night before the 2008 financial crisis started. At a fictional investment bank, Eric Dale (Tucci), is unceremoniously fired after nineteen years with the company, a victim of mass layoffs. He’s the head of risk management and, on his way out the door, hands a flash drive to Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), telling him to look into Dale’s last project. Sullivan works late and discovers that the bank is over-leveraged: a 25% decline in the value of it’s mortgage-backed securities would be more than the value of the entire company. They need to get rid of these worthless assets and fast. Of course, if they start selling, they will start a panic that would seriously disrupt the financial system. Sound familiar?

The rest of the film shows the bank’s leadership (Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Simon Baker, and Demi Moore) debating about how to move forward. We know how it happened in real life and the fates of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Goldman Sachs, but this is a movie, so there’s no telling what will happen.

4/5

The War Within (2005)

Hassan (Ayad Aktar), a Pakistani engineering student studying in Paris, is seized by American operatives and tortured for being a suspected terrorist. We have no knowledge of whether or not Hassan actually is a terrorist, but the ordeal introduces him to his cellmate, a terrorist himself, and the torture causes Hassan to join the terrorist’s cell. Having arriving in New Jersey to participate in a plot to detonate bombs throughout New York City, Hassan begins to have doubts as he observes the life his best friend, Sayeed (Firdous Bamji), has created for his family in the United States.

This was a tough movie to watch. To have sympathy for an individual who seeks to cause wanton destruction and mass murder can be difficult to process. Yet director Joseph Castelo does forces us to do just that. By taking us through Hassan’s journey and reminding us with flashbacks to his captivity, we are forced to ask what we might do, how malleable we might be to ideas of hate and death.

4/5