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.