Margin Call opened four months ago, so this review isn’t exactly timely, but for readers who haven’t seen it, it purports to be about the 2008 financial crisis. Since the Antiplanner has written extensively about this crisis, I found the movie intriguing enough to watch the DVD.
The entire picture takes place during about 27 hours in the life of an investment bank loosely modeled after Lehman Brothers, which went bankrupt in September, 2008. While the bank in the movie is never named, it has many parallels to Lehman. Lehman’s CEO, Richard Fuld, though out of touch with his employees, was at one time worth a billion dollars based on the value of his Lehman Brothers stock. The movie CEO, cleverly named John Tuld, is similarly remote but is also said to be worth a billion. Lehman’s chief financial officer in charge of risk management was a beautiful blonde who some whispered gained her position more because of a never-proven affair with the company’s executive VP than because of her skills. The movie’s chief risk manager, played by Demi Moore, is a beautiful brunette who apparently has a close but not fully disclosed relationship with the bank’s number two person. The blonde and her boss end up losing their jobs a few months before Lehman’s goes bankrupt; here the movie breaks from reality in that only Moore loses her job.
