Gary Thompson: 'Margin Call' exposes traders' response to disaster

TIMING IN movies is everything, and the timing for the bad banker drama "Margin Call" would seem to be perfect.

Anti-bailout protesters have suddenly materialized all over the country, the world, and their ranks are still swelling as "Margin Call" arrives in theaters - the first Hollywood drama, really, to take an inside look at height-of-the-disaster events within a culpable investment firm.

"Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" mostly sidestepped the housing bubble, and the HBO offering "Too Big To Fail" was all about damage control, or about Ben Bernanke eating oatmeal, or something, I'm still not sure.

Now comes "Margin Call," a movie that shows us traders doing the actual dirty work, off-loading crap securities onto credulous investors, the first movie, one naturally expects, to go all medieval on Wall Street.

Well, not really. It's written and directed by a guy, J.C. Chandor, who grew up in the home of a Merrill Lynch exec, in a Jersey suburb where neighbors would suddenly disappear when somebody's parent made a bad trade and had to sell the house.

It's a movie that understands the trader's life, the Wall Street culture, and it hews to that perspective, without excusing corporate or individual actions.

"Frankly, one of my main reasons for writing the film at the time [2008] . . . was that nobody was really cutting through the idealogy surrounding the topic. It was completely confined to these caricatures of good and evil, and I wanted to get beyond that, way beyond that," he said.

"Margin Call" is a little movie - $3.5 million, rounded up by the production company of star Zachary Quinto, who plays the low-rung auditor who discovers that his firm is sitting on a mountain of toxic mortgage securities.

Soon he's got the ear of senior management types (Jeremy Irons, Simon Baker, Kevin Spacey), who understand that to survive, they must sell their inventory to an unsuspecting investment public. Thus falls the domino that knocks over homes, pensions, lives.

But was it the first domino to fall?

Chandor doesn't think so.

"I think that in 2008 we reached a moment where 25 years of incremental policy change had led slowly to this disaster. The line had been moving, imperceptibly but consistently," he said.

In the chaos of 2008, investment bankers were instinctively trying to save their business.

"People want to reduce all of these decisions to greed, and I think you do a disservice to the truth when you limit it to one word," he said.

Not that greed didn't play a role, or that wholesale reform isn't warranted. Chandor says he's amazed and pleased by the Occupy Wall Street movement, in his mind long overdue.

"When you have a system failure, the conversation has to be about fixing the system, and those on the outside the system have every right to grab a megaphone and make their feelings known," said Chandor, especially if their taxpayer dollars restored the failed system.

Chandor said the ranks of Occupy Wall Street contain some people you see in his movie - those who lost their Wall Street jobs when the system failed. There's a lot of internal carnage at his fictional investment firm.

"These people feel very let down by their leaders," Chandor said. "There wasn't enough courageous leadership. There was nobody willing to pump the brakes."