Month: November 2011

In spite of its lackluster visual style and its queasily compassionate portrayal of heartless Wall Street hucksters, writer-director J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call is one of the year’s most impressive and entertaining films.

Margin Call is about an investment firm facing a financial crisis, but the film’s blackest running joke is that only one or two people who work there truly knows how or why it’s happening. Most of the action takes place over a 24-hour period that begins when financial whiz kid Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) is given a flash drive by his just-fired former mentor Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), who tells him to “be careful” with its contents. As day turns into night, Sullivan finishes the work Dale started. And his conclusions are disturbing enough to prompt a late-night/early-morning meeting with the firm’s top brass.

You don’t need to know much about mortgage-backed securities or market capitalization to share these company men’s sense of panic. Indeed, Chandor lets terms linger throughout the film as ominous shibboleths. In a sly bit of narrative compression, Chandor also positions the firm’s CEO, John Tuld (Jeremy Irons), as an audience surrogate. When Tuld arrives at the office via helicopter to see if he can fix his company’s mess, he asks for a manageable summary of events unadorned by any scary fiscal mumbo-jumbo. When he coos to Sullivan, “Speak as you might to a young child or a golden retriever,” he — and we — are both relieved and frightened.

The additional talk that unspools as the firm’s members figure out how to save themselves is glorious — direct, wry, contemplative, bewildered, and ultimately mournful. There are several superb ancillary performances to relish, with Irons, Quinto, Paul Bettany, and Demi Moore (!) as the standouts. But as longtime trader Sam Rogers, Kevin Spacey may have the best role of all. He’s landed a part his friend and mentor, the late Jack Lemmon, would have coveted, and there’s more than a little of The Apartment‘s C.C. Baxter in Spacey’s conflicted corporate cheerleader. While his prickly intelligence and smarter-than-you vocal inflections never disappear entirely (can any American actor convey more menace with the question “What?”), Spacey’s performance is anchored by a solid, middle-aged fatigue that he’s never shown before.

Toward the end of the film, one of the characters justifies his actions by pointing the finger at the American middle class for its willingness to look away from the dirty financial dealings that have helped underwrite the American dream. It’s a bold and uncomfortable accusation — and one that, in spite of my own loathing for corporate America and disaster capitalism, definitely hit me (and my retirement accounts) hard. The boys at the computers in the big city are easy to blame, but anyone looking for downright villainy has seen too many movies. How shocking that a film full of riffs on numbers, projections, and the expediencies of moral relativism would save one of its best gut-punches for the well-heeled rubes in the seats.

Margin Call

Opening Friday, November 4th

Ridgeway Four

In 10th grade, this guy talked to my English class about how he didn’t believe William Shakespeare wrote the plays of William Shakespeare. The traveling academic said that the playwright Christopher Marlowe, the scientist Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere (the Earl of Oxford), or a handful of others might have written them. There’s evidence backing each of the claims, and much of the supposition comes from the idea that the historical Shakespeare seems an unlikely candidate to be the author of the plays.

Now, disaster-movie auteur Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012) has made a movie, Anonymous, about the question of Shakespearean authorship, advocating for de Vere. Such is the extent of the mess the film makes that it succeeds only in eliminating de Vere as a candidate. I don’t know what happened back in the 1500s, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen the preposterous way Anonymous says.

The script, by John Orloff, is a big part of the problem. Anonymous introduces a dozen characters, and before you can suss out the differences between the earls of Oxford, Southampton, and Essex and members of the family Cecil, the film hops around decades with younger and older versions of them. Emmerich doesn’t help with a visual palette that’s dank, dark, grimy, ugly.

But what can be gathered is this: Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans as an adult, Jamie Campbell Bower as a youth) is a genius writer and thinker who cannot publish under his name because of political ambitions and cultural prejudices. He’s penned a library full of unstaged plays with names like King Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet. He’s also the former lover of Queen Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson) — alas, she’s the Juliet to his Romeo.

London aristocracy is a potboiler at the time. Trusted adviser to the throne William Cecil (David Thewlis) and his son Robert (Edward Hogg and Isaiah Michalski) want to control who will succeed Elizabeth as monarch, angling for James, King of Scots (James Clyde). Edward de Vere backs either the Earl of Southampton (Xavier Samuel) or the Earl of Essex (Sam Reid), I can’t remember which.

Seeing the power of the stage — “10,000 people listening to the writings of one man” — de Vere constructs works that will sway the mob against the Cecils and toward his own aims. He feeds works to renowned playwright Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) and asks that they be produced under Jonson’s name. A drunkard actor named William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) seizes upon Jonson’s indecisiveness and claims credit for himself.

That’s just the premise.

The acting in Anonymous, it must be said, is roundly excellent. There are also a few good lines, such as Jonson saying, “I’m a writer, of course I’ve been arrested.”

But Anonymous can’t settle on whether de Vere was a calculating political player or a man suffering for his art, who has to put characters to parchment “to set them free,” else he’ll go mad. And what Anonymous does with its premise is a complete shambles, a farce.

A thousand monkeys fingering a thousand typewriters for a thousand years couldn’t come up with this.

Anonymous

Opening Friday, November 4th

Malco Paradiso