A film I like to revisit at least three times a year is Margin Call, J.C. Chandor’s 2011 gem set in an investment bank on the eve of the 2008 financial crash. I keep returning to it for three reasons: Chandor’s assured storytelling, which belies the fact that it was his debut; the quiet elegance of its visuals—no explosions, car chases, or sex; and a great ensemble cast—Demi Moore, Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons—each delivering lines so finely tuned they land like thrusts in a sword fight.
Then there is the plot itself, modelled on the collapse of Bear Sterns that started the 2008 crash. A junior analyst discovers that the bank’s assets are about to become worthless, and collapse is imminent. Senior executives are summoned overnight for an emergency meeting. As they try to avert disaster, all of them must confront uncomfortable moral and ethical questions.
Margin Call was an indie that never reached Indian theatres—it went straight to DVD. Today, you can rent it on YouTube for 25. Over the years, I have seen bits of it everywhere except a cinema hall. I have watched it at home, in salons, bus stations, airports, and even restrooms—perhaps in every place where you could do nothing but wait.
There is a boardroom scene that I find endlessly fascinating. During the emergency meeting, CEO John Tuld (Irons, magnetic as ever) asks Peter Sullivan, the young analyst, to explain the crisis. “Please speak as you might to a young child, or a golden retriever,” he reassures him.
Sullivan tells him that a large portion of the bank’s assets are rotting, or losing value fast. If they remain in the books and become worthless, the firm’s total losses would be greater than its market capitalisation.
“So, what you are telling me,” Tuld replies, “is that the music is about to stop, and we are going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous excrement ever assembled in the history of capitalism.”
Sullivan clarifies that the music has not stopped yet—it is only slowing.
Tuld asks him whether he cares to know why he earns the big bucks as the CEO. He rises from his seat, and walks to the glass wall overlooking Manhattan. “I am here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That’s it. Nothing more,” he says. “And standing here tonight, I am afraid that I don’t hear a thing—just silence.”
This scene is my favourite. Each time I watch it, I admire the precision with which Chandor stages it, and the weary elegance with which Irons utters that last line. After the meeting, the executives decide that they have no choice but to “react”—that is, dump their toxic assets to unsuspecting buyers. When someone accuses Tuld of panicking, he replies coolly: “If you are first out the door, that’s not called panicking.”
Margin Call offers one of the sharpest dissections of capitalism ever filmed, laying bare the extreme selfishness at its core. Curiously, as I later discovered, Chandor himself leans towards capitalism. “I believe things can come from a capitalist system,” he said during the Occupy Wall Street protests that erupted the year the film released, “but the simple fact that the more money you have, the easier it is to make more money is one of the tragic flaws of capitalism.”
Like all great films, Margin Call reveals new layers with every viewing. It also oddly alters how I see the places where I watch it. Once, on a journey through Alappuzha—the old port town known as the Venice of the East—I looked up from Tuld on my phone screen and saw a grand old building with unmistakable colonial touches: clay tiles over wooden rafters, long colonnades, cathedral windows. It was Leo XIII High School, named after the pope who, in 1891, wrote an encyclical denouncing both unbridled capitalism and atheistic socialism. Built by Jesuits in 1888, when Kerala was first beginning to feel the tremors of colonial capitalism, the school became a beacon of Catholic education—so rigorous that people compared it to England’s Harrow. Among its early students was K.M. Mathew, the first editor of THE WEEK.
The mark of a good film is that it continues to speak to you even when you are not watching it. It helps connect the seemingly unconnected, illuminating deeper meanings beneath the obvious ones.
Last Sunday, I finally understood Tuld’s music analogy.
I was outside a church in central Kerala, enduring a relative’s wedding. Usually, I approach weddings like surgical strikes—I get in, raid the buffet, and get out, managing just about enough conversations so that the hosts could later faintly remember my presence.
This time, there was no such escape. My daughter, Norah, was the bride’s tholma—something like a flower girl, but more central to the ceremony. Which meant my wife, Milu, and I were part of the core wedding party and had to sit through the entire four-hour ordeal. I have little experience attending full weddings; the last time I sat through one, more than a decade ago, ended with the priest sending me home with Milu as my wife.
Once Milu and Norah took their places inside the church, I stepped out for air. The century-old church stood atop a hill, ringed by other hills—some green with rubber trees, others cut open into quarries where earth-movers were at work. Near the sacristy, I ran into a professor who had once taught me constitutional law, now weeks away from retirement. “Best to leave before everything bites the dust,” he said with a weary smile, before launching into a familiar lament: Kerala’s colleges were being hollowed out. Students were fleeing abroad, and those who remained seemed listless and disinterested.
The music, he said, was slowing.
The quarries in the hills were feeding stones to high rises in cities; flyovers were arching over sleepy towns that refused to listen to the change. One of them now bypassed the entire port town of Alappuzha. Leo XIII School now stood in flyover country.
When the choir struck up a hymn sometime near noon, I knew the ceremony had ended. Outside, under the blistering sun, people were loading their assets—wives, children, parents—into gleaming cars before unloading them again at the swanky reception hall. A good number of them had come from abroad for the wedding; the faces of some of the children said they couldn’t wait to leave. By the time Norah emerged with the bride and groom, the professor was gone.
And there, amid the heat and dust, the last piece of Margin Call fell into place. Like Tuld, I stood there—watching and wishing that I could still hear the music.