The irony involved in making J C Chandor's Margin Call about the Wall Street financial collapse lay in trying to raise finance for the film in the midst of the disaster itself. Fortunately the effort was successful, and the result is a considerably better film than Oliver Stone's Wall Street II.
There are two outstanding performances. The first and best is by Kevin Spacey as the experienced head broker of an old-established firm who is peremptorily given his cards and escorted out of the office as the firm brutally downsizes. He leaves on his computer vital evidence of the impending collapse and Paul Bettany's younger colleague has to pick up the pieces. Soon Irons's British chief executive flies in from London to hear the worst.
"I didn't get this job because of my brains," he says, "Explain it all to me as if I'm a labrador." But when he hears about the extent of the damage, he orders instant selling of the millions of dollars of stock he knows is actually worthless. The result is the survival not of the fittest but at least of the most duplicitous.
The chief virtue, apart from the acting, of this crisply made film is that it manages to explain what's going on without either boring or going into too much complicated detail. That way Margin Call becomes as good as any film yet made about the financial collapse that hit America and the world.
It's a fiction that tells at least part of the facts extremely well.
The Berlin Film Festival runs until Sunday. berlinale.de
