Author: Keith Humphreys

Of the Wall Street movies made in the wake of the financial crisis, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, drew the most attention, awards, and audience receipts. But I think The Magnificent Martin was outshone by a low budget film of a first-time writer/director: Margin Call.

Made in 17 breathless days by J.C. Chandor in 2011, the film documents 24 insane hours at an unnamed Wall Street firm. The story opens with casual brutality: traders and managers being professionally and publicly fired and marched out of the building while their colleagues continue working around them. Revealingly, the only people who are perturbed by the inhumanity are the newer employees; everyone else learned the hard truth a long time ago. But it is a moment of humanity on which the story turns. As long-serving risk management expert Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) is cruelly cut loose, a whiz kid analyst named Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) thanks him warmly for his mentorship. Eric is touched, his armor drops for a moment, and he hands Peter a thumb drive and says: “Be careful”. The thumb drive contains a partially completed statistical model which Peter quickly perfects, revealing that the firm has enormous risk exposure that could bankrupt it at any moment. As panic sets in, higher and higher levels of management are brought in to save the firm by any means necessary. High-powered acting and drama ensue.

The cast is star-studded, with Paul Bettany as a mid-level trading manager who wonders why he never breaks into the higher echelons of the firm, Kevin Spacey as a world-weary survivor of decades on The Street, and Simon Baker as an ice cold executive. The role of the CEO — one of those “let’s write a colorful small part for a prestige actor” roles — is played with just the right touch of theatricality by Jeremy Irons. Irons is particularly effective at conveying one of the script’s principal messages: The higher up you go, the more sociopathic and substantively ignorant people become.

Demi Moore also gives an excellent performance as the one woman in authority within the firm. She projects power laced with the underlying brittleness and fear of someone who is smashed flat against the glass ceiling. The script offers no sentimental dreck about corporate women being nicer the men: She after all is the one who cans the long serving Eric Dale after failing to listen to his warnings. Yet we also feel sorry for her because it’s obvious that when the boys’ club pins the blame on someone for the catastrophe, it will be a fall girl and not a fall guy.

Yet with all that star talent, the real star here is J.C. Chandor, in one of the most promising cinematic debuts in quite some time. His script and direction make for brisk pacing without sacrificing nuance. A story about the corrupting influence of money on both the best and the worst of us could easily have been preachy or heavy-handed, but here it’s artful and wise. Most notably, Chandor humanizes the characters while not forgiving them. A few more lines of quotable dialogue, including a moment or two with some comic relief, might have made it even better, but that’s a small complaint about a polished and multi-layered script. Hats off to Chandor as director as well, for clearly not being intimidated by his stellar cast, and for offering a compelling vision of the people, motives, and actions that wrecked the global economy.

p.s. This film makes an excellent double feature with a differently styled but still excellent film about the financial crisis, The Big Short.

Many films structure their narrative around the power of visitors to disrupt overtly settled lives. Sometimes the results are comic (e.g., The Mating Season), sometimes they are dramatic and heart-warming, (e.g., The Bishop’s Wife) sometimes they are sinister (e.g., The Intruder), and sometimes they are a combination of all these things, as in the superb 1990 film To Sleep With Anger.

The plot: The heads of a multi-generational family, Gideon (Paul Butler) and Suzie (Mary Alice), left The South geographically — but not culturally — decades ago and established themselves in a middle-class Black neighborhood in Los Angeles. Their sons now have families of their own, though Junior (Carl Lumbly) is eminently responsible and “Babe Brother” (Richard Brooks) is immature and selfish. Into this fairly placid picture comes Harry (Danny Glover), a charming acquaintance from back home whom they haven’t seen in 30 years. The trusting, good-hearted Gideon and Suzie invite Harry to stay with them for as long as he wishes. Much like a vampire, once invited over the threshold Harry changes from ingratiating to calculating, undermining the family’s well-being for reasons that remain mysterious.

Writer/Director Charles Burnett put himself on the map with his cinema vérité film school thesis project Killer of Sheep. That film has been lionized by critics as one of the great movies of the 1970s, but its lack of narrative structure or character development limits its appeal outside cineaste circles. In contrast, To Sleep With Anger is a much more accessible movie. Burnett creates an array of full-blooded characters who evolve in believable ways, and a storyline that is dramatically rich. He also proves an assured director in his first film with professional actors.

The heart of the film is Danny Glover, in a darker role than he typically assays (Indeed, other than on some episodes of Hill Street Blues, this is the only time I can recall him getting to develop a malignant character on screen). He is masterful from the very first scene at appearing straightforward, open-hearted, and uncomplicated, while subtly cueing the audience that Harry is none of these things (Burnett’s script is also a help here, giving us some supernatural tipoffs). Some film reviewers have referred to Harry as a “trickster” character but I don’t think that fits. In Black folklore, the trickster uses his wits to triumph over people with more power (e.g., Whites). Harry instead is a danger to the vulnerable and the weak.

Around the mystery of Harry’s motives and nature are more conventional subplots of family drama: The tensions between adults set in their ways and children who want something more modern, the love and rivalry between siblings, and the way marriages can be strong and frail at the same time. With a big assist from Burnett, the entire cast makes these well-worn themes come alive on screen in an authentic and touching way, with some humorous moments as well. In 2019, To Sleep With Anger was selected for inclusion in the Criterion Collection, a deserved honor for this highly original and engaging movie.