Loss and gain. I gave up two hours, and I got some interesting education in finance plus a good conversation afterward with two lovely friends who joined me. If the three of us start cursing like sailors anytime soon, you can blame the movie.
How many people do you know who actually gained during the heavy losses of the 2008 financial meltdown? Because apparently some people made a whole lot of money in the process, but I don’t know any of them. One of the reasons I don’t know any of them is because they live in the world of investment banking, an area of the economy I do not rightly understand.
Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons play two of the senior decision makers. Each of them comes across as jaded and slightly sinister, though Spacey also has a likeable everyman quality that comes through. Kevin Spacey is excellent, as he usually is. His character is nicely textured. The movie opens with mass firings of his fellow employees, and Sam, Spacey’s character, can only be bothered to think about his dog’s ill health. He can disagree fundamentally with what is happening, and he still has the ability to be the slick leader who smooths over all the rough spots. Good acting all around, including Paul Bettany and Stanley Tucci, with the possible flat note of Demi Moore.
A Forbes article criticized this film for whitewashing the situation, making viewers like the bankers and even putting some blame on the victims. It’s an interesting point of view, but I can’t say watching this made me like them more or blame them less. It did humanize them, which allows me to identify with them, in turn allowing me to examine myself. Villifying them completely would allow me to hold myself apart, seeing them only as the bad guys. Contrary to the old Wall Street words, greed is not good. But it is something most all of us have experience with on both sides—as perpetrator and as victim.
Zachary Quinto plays the young banker who figures out that things could go very badly. In college, he studied rocket science. He’s a symbol of all the brainpower of the 90s and aughts that ended up in the financial sector because that’s where the money was, illustrating one of the flaws of capitalism. He is also the conscience of the movie, a conscience that you can only believe will be squelched in good time.
Spacey’s character instructs the young team to have faith that they have done much good, that their “talents have been used.” This is language we often use when dealing with the long view of religious faith. It seems no coincidence; these are people who have dedicated their lives to money and the pursuit of it, and their god comes in from above (in his helicopter), in the form of Jeremy Irons. While they face payoffs in exchange for stunted careers and broken business and family relationships, he looks into the future and sees more money to be made for himself.
One effective scene shows the scrambling office and ticking clock while we hear the phone conversations of one of the bankers, trying to swing some deals with his customers. You can tell he’s worked these relationships a long time, and you get a sense of the cost to him if he loses those relationships because of unscrupulous selling. One character compares investment banking to gambling; this seems apt as both tend to end with a few big winners and a lot of people who lose everything.
The Forbes article also mentioned that J. C. Chandor, the movie’s writer and director, is the son of a 40-year Merrill Lynch employee. The author felt that the movie was Chandor’s attempt to justify the world he grew up in. If this is the sympathetic view of his father’s work, I’d hate to see what it’d look like if he really wanted his dad’s vocation to look bad.
No comments:
Post a Comment