Margin Call

Turns out the good guys in this Wall Street drama – the risk analysts who spot the error that precipitates the financial crisis – are both engineers by training. They could have spent their lives building tangible things, but the money to be made in finance was too much to turn down.

J.C. Chandor portrays this twilight world of investment banking as a place of constant alienation and existential bewilderment. Employees lose their jobs at random. No one is certain of where they stand relative to anyone else. The sense of people's work and words is often unclear. In some respects it reminded me of the numb absurdity of an Antonioni film.

This is captured in a great shot-reverse-shot sequence with Stanley Tucci and Demi Moore towards the end of the film. Both are supposed to be looking at each other, and normally that would mean having one to the left of the frame looking right, and the other to the right of the frame looking left. Instead, one is framed to the right and looks right outside the frame, and the other to the left looking left. There are supposedly talking to each other, but actually a dialogue is never achieved. They are speaking to the empty space around them, unable to make a connection.

A Most Violent Year

Like a lot of gangster films, this one is really about the American Dream and the myth of the self-made man. Morales wants to grow his business in the "right" way, and finds that working hard and playing by the rules can only get you so far. Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.

Morales is an archetypal American hero, completely self-possessed, fighting fit, a breadwinner. His wife is smart, sexy and an excellent mother to his three girls. Under enormous pressure, they steer their family into the clear. The film sets up a contrast between this power couple and one of Morales's drivers which leads to a confrontation at the very end. The example Morales sets proves to be an impossible standard for his employee. The two men's different fates may be a way of undercutting and critiquing the ideal the film presents.

Perhaps significant that Morales's business concerns fuel, or oil. One of the most memorable shots in the film is Morales stepping over a dead body to plug a leak in a blood-splattered container of the precious fluid. An image that may nod to American compromises abroad (something the recent death of the Saudi king has highlighed).