Above: Zachary Quinto and Penn Badgley in Margin Call
Finance and economics do not take well to the screen. The BBC is often reduced to using the handy traffic island outside the Bank of England as a backdrop to report unchanged interest rates.
But the financial collapse of 2008 has provoked many attempts to make drama out of the crisis. Some are films of the even more numerous books. The best narrative of events, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail has been dramatised by HBO, while Brad Pitt, who starred in and produced a movie of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, is reportedly planning to film Lewis’s brilliant exposition of the subprime crisis, The Big Short. Perhaps I am the only person who finds collateralised debt obligations easier to understand than baseball, and I’m looking forward to seeing whether Brad’s skill with synthetic derivatives matches his prowess with sports statistics.
Some documentary films have tried to explain the crisis, with mixed results. Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story is not regarded even by his admirers as one of his best efforts. Struggling with the visuals, he mimics the hapless BBC reporter by posturing outside the offices of AIG and Goldman Sachs.
David Sington’s The Flaw is a more thoughtful effort, but misses the main story. His thesis is that rising inequality can be socially acceptable only if poor people are allowed to borrow to finance rising consumption despite their static incomes. There is something in this argument, but excessive borrowing by people on lower incomes was not the central cause of the collapse.
For a cinematic account of the crisis, Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job is the film to watch. Opening with footage of idyllic Iceland and its angry inhabitants, the documentary spends most of its time in interviews with participants and observers. The film suffers from the unwillingness of those centrally involved to talk. The only commentators from the financial services industry are George Soros and Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan’s predecessor as head of the Federal Reserve, who are sufficiently old and detached to take a dispassionate view, and a gormless lobbyist. The investment bankers were wise to stay silent, as Ferguson’s takedown of a clutch of economists demonstrates. They condemn themselves in their own words: not just for their failure to understand what was happening, but also from how much they earned from their wilful blindness to what was going on.
That makes good watching, but drama is better. Like other Oliver Stone films, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps provides undemanding fun and unbelievable plot lines. Gordon Gekko, the anti-hero of the original Wall Street, is released from prison. He does good through bad in a creaky story with cardboard characters.
If that movie qualifies for a rating in the lower tranches of investment grades, JC Chandor’s new film, arriving in cinemas on 13th January, comes closer to the coveted triple A. Margin Call offers no insight into the technicalities of modern finance. But while Capitalism, Inside Job and the Wall Street sequel invite us to boo the villains and cheer the heroes, Margin Call seeks to convey some of the complexities of the personalities involved and the environments in which these disasters happen. Set in a fictionalised Lehman Brothers-like investment bank, the film’s characters are not nice people, but nor are they evil. The central character, played by Kevin Spacey conveys a sense that his well-paid job has emptied him personally and professionally.
Jeremy Irons provides a gripping performance as the boss of the firm, John Tuld. As with Dick Fuld, the disgraced chief executive of Lehman, there is not much subtlety here—but Irons gives an impression of authority and intelligence which his real life counterpart did not quite achieve. And, perhaps for that reason, the bank that is the subject of Margin Call, unlike Lehman, lives to trade another day.
Books are for exposition, drama for a sense of time and place. Read The Big Short, and watch Margin Call.
Finance and economics do not take well to the screen. The BBC is often reduced to using the handy traffic island outside the Bank of England as a backdrop to report unchanged interest rates.
But the financial collapse of 2008 has provoked many attempts to make drama out of the crisis. Some are films of the even more numerous books. The best narrative of events, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail has been dramatised by HBO, while Brad Pitt, who starred in and produced a movie of Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, is reportedly planning to film Lewis’s brilliant exposition of the subprime crisis, The Big Short. Perhaps I am the only person who finds collateralised debt obligations easier to understand than baseball, and I’m looking forward to seeing whether Brad’s skill with synthetic derivatives matches his prowess with sports statistics.
Some documentary films have tried to explain the crisis, with mixed results. Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story is not regarded even by his admirers as one of his best efforts. Struggling with the visuals, he mimics the hapless BBC reporter by posturing outside the offices of AIG and Goldman Sachs.
David Sington’s The Flaw is a more thoughtful effort, but misses the main story. His thesis is that rising inequality can be socially acceptable only if poor people are allowed to borrow to finance rising consumption despite their static incomes. There is something in this argument, but excessive borrowing by people on lower incomes was not the central cause of the collapse.
For a cinematic account of the crisis, Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job is the film to watch. Opening with footage of idyllic Iceland and its angry inhabitants, the documentary spends most of its time in interviews with participants and observers. The film suffers from the unwillingness of those centrally involved to talk. The only commentators from the financial services industry are George Soros and Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan’s predecessor as head of the Federal Reserve, who are sufficiently old and detached to take a dispassionate view, and a gormless lobbyist. The investment bankers were wise to stay silent, as Ferguson’s takedown of a clutch of economists demonstrates. They condemn themselves in their own words: not just for their failure to understand what was happening, but also from how much they earned from their wilful blindness to what was going on.
That makes good watching, but drama is better. Like other Oliver Stone films, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps provides undemanding fun and unbelievable plot lines. Gordon Gekko, the anti-hero of the original Wall Street, is released from prison. He does good through bad in a creaky story with cardboard characters.
If that movie qualifies for a rating in the lower tranches of investment grades, JC Chandor’s new film, arriving in cinemas on 13th January, comes closer to the coveted triple A. Margin Call offers no insight into the technicalities of modern finance. But while Capitalism, Inside Job and the Wall Street sequel invite us to boo the villains and cheer the heroes, Margin Call seeks to convey some of the complexities of the personalities involved and the environments in which these disasters happen. Set in a fictionalised Lehman Brothers-like investment bank, the film’s characters are not nice people, but nor are they evil. The central character, played by Kevin Spacey conveys a sense that his well-paid job has emptied him personally and professionally.
Jeremy Irons provides a gripping performance as the boss of the firm, John Tuld. As with Dick Fuld, the disgraced chief executive of Lehman, there is not much subtlety here—but Irons gives an impression of authority and intelligence which his real life counterpart did not quite achieve. And, perhaps for that reason, the bank that is the subject of Margin Call, unlike Lehman, lives to trade another day.
Books are for exposition, drama for a sense of time and place. Read The Big Short, and watch Margin Call.
