Money On Film: Margin Call

0:06Hello and welcome to Money on Film. I'm Felix Salmon of Slate Money. And I'm Nadira Goffe, culture writer at Slate. We're here because we watch movies. Uh-huh. And, well, Slate Money has for a while done this sort of intermittent series called Slate Money Goes to the Movies. It turns out that there's a lot of money in a lot of movies. And so I thought that we could get together and talk about three in particular. Three movies which touch on money. We are going to be talking about materialists, which is personal finance, dating, how much money you have and how that places you in the world. We are going to be talking about Spirited Way, which is an absolutely heartbreakingly gorgeous fairy tale, but is also a very sophisticated economic allegory about Japan in the late 90s and the early 2000s.

1:05In this very special, amazing crossover event episode, we are going to be talking about one of my favorite films, which is Margin Call. So we're going to talk about Margin Call on video. Yes. Luckily, if you want to see my very confused face as Felix talks about mortgage-backed securities, then you can do that because we are currently filming in Slate Studios where you can find all these episodes of Money on Film on YouTube. Margin Call, which I watched for, I think, the fourth time to prepare for this. and every time I watch this movie, it gets better. This is one of those movies which only gets better the more you watch it.

1:51The first time I watched it, I think I was too caught up in the financial crisis. As many were. Well, I mean, I was blogging the financial crisis multiple times a day and I watched it as a financial crisis film and I got very annoyed at whatever differences there were between the financial crisis and what was on film. And I kind of missed how good of a movie it is just as a movie. And the further away we get from the financial crisis, the more I appreciate how good of a movie it is. And also, amazingly, how true it is, if not to the financial crisis, but to the general gestalt of finance in New York.

2:33Yeah, it's it's a you know, there's a lot of movies about money and specifically when they're talking about Wall Street, where money is like sexy and dangerous and a risk. It's always it's that thing about risk. The classic one being the eponymous Wall Street by Oliver Stone, which is, you know, it's like and in that one, you get the protagonist of the film, Bud Fox, like going to jail at the end because it's all about the how it's so risky. You wind up going to jail inside of trading that kind of stuff. The sexy bit of finance. What we are dealing with in Margin Call is literally mortgage backed securities, the least sexy bit of finance.

3:14And that is one of the things I love about this. Yeah, I was all up in that Wikipedia. I really had to search a lot of these terms, but we got there. We managed. Wait, so before we start talking about what money is doing in this movie, tell me, well, why don't you explain actually what happens in the movie? Explain the premise, because I certainly can't. So the premise is, yeah, the premise is not that complicated, if like me, you're a finance geek, which is basically that this investment bank, and this is very much a pre-crisis investment bank going through something which is very similar to the big financial crisis of 2008, that you have this investment bank, which like many investment banks back then was very leveled up.

3:55So think Lehman Brothers, think Bear Stearns, to some extent, maybe think Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs, but probably closer to the slightly smaller ones like Lehman or Bear. And they have this massive amount of MBS on their balance sheets, these mortgage-backed securities. To get a little bit technical, these things were designed to be AAA rated, very safe. Because they are designed to be very safe, you can, what's known as, lever them up. You can borrow a lot of money against them. So you can have more mortgage-backed securities on your balance sheet than you have in market capitalization.

4:31And then if the value of those super, super safe AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities goes down by quite a big chunk in bond terms, like 25 % is the number they give in the movie, is a huge move for a bond. Not so big for stocks. If stocks move that much, no one would blink. If bonds move that much, you can wipe out an entire bank. And so what happens is that, you know, the quant risk guy does a bunch of fancy mathematics, discovers that, oh, my God, we have a bunch of leverage, which you would think would not require a bunch of fancy mathematics. We will allow that for the purpose. He's quite literally a rocket scientist.

5:08He's quite literally a rocket scientist. I would like to point that out. Yeah, you do not need to be a rocket scientist to realize that if you have a lot of leverage, things can blow up quickly. But apparently you do in this movie. um and then there's like an emergency um like middle of the night meeting going up to sort of ceo level um where the bank tries to decide what to do now that it's been shock horror discovers that it has a whole bunch of leverage and on the on these mbs's and the decision is made that what they are going to do is just dump all of these securities into the market first thing in the morning and that is going to do terrible things for the bond market and it's going to do terrible things for wall street as a whole but it might save the bank this is all again like against the backdrop of the financial crisis where people are getting laid off anyway and things are bad in the markets so that's sort of the premise of the movie and what about it makes it a good movie and I guess a good movie about money to you?

6:12Because I have some thoughts. I feel like I've seen, there are certain things that are happening in this movie that I think are really interesting that I haven't quite seen in other movies about money, mind you. I haven't watched many movies so explicitly about money. But I do think one thing that I sort of am really intrigued by are all of the different players that this movie has and their different perspectives on money, right? So you have the top dogs who, You know, you have Jeremy Irons in this movie who's very much like they're just numbers. These are just people. He's like a multimillionaire, maybe even a billionaire.

6:45You know, he's the top dog of this investment bank. And he's very blasé. You know, whenever someone expresses concern about the fact that they are dumping all this MBS onto other people, right, he's just kind of like, well, market goes through periods of instability. That's not our fault. Our job is to protect this company. Right. And then you have all the way sort of at the lower totem pole, you have the Zachary Quinto character and the Pam Badgley character who are just like the grunt workers. And so Zachary Quinto is the rocket scientist. And I guess because he's a scientist, he's the only one who seems to care about other human beings.

7:21You see, I don't think he does. I think weirdly the only person who cares about other human beings or who cares about the consequences of their actions in this movie is the Kevin Spacey character, right? So Kevin Spacey is like the head of the trading floor. And he's the one who will tell everyone who will listen, look, you can't do this because we are, I'm a salesman and every good salesman looks after his clients and you don't fuck your clients basically, because that is just bad for long-term health of your firm and your reputation and all the rest of it. And he is the one like, maybe he's being self-interested about it, or maybe he's just putting it in terms that someone like Jeremy Irons, who is self-interested, will understand.

8:05But either way, he's the one looking out for the broader ecosystem. I don't think anyone else is. Yeah, that's true. That's true. And I think to your point, there is a sort of natural intuition that the higher you float up the greasy pole, the less you care about the little guy. But in fact, I think one of the true-to-life parts of this movie is that it starts like our sort of everyman intern Penn Badgley guy. Oh, my love in this movie. Who is sort of the proxy for the viewer. Like, I don't really understand what's going on. I'm new to all of this. But he is, he doesn't evince any real empathy for anyone.

8:51At the start, yeah. And then two-thirds of the way through, he feels sorry for himself. Exactly. Maybe because he's about to get fired. Exactly. It's the first time that he... So yeah, he's our sort of guinea pig in this whole scenario. And what I love about him is his obsession with money. The first question that he has whenever he meets anyone involved in this whole thing. And they're freaking out, right? They're panicking. They're like, what do we do? And he's just like, how much money do you make? Like, you know, the movie takes place over about 24 hours straight. And it starts from them finding out what happened to them deciding to do this fire sale.

9:27And throughout it all, every single time there's like a new thing and things turn for the worse. And Ben Badgley meets a new character he's never met before. He's just like, how much money do you make? And he's really obsessed with this idea of money, with this idea of status. And not even security, but I think just this lifestyle. and there are a few characters who try to impart upon him a number of times that this is bigger than just the back of this town car or this is bigger than just this conference room right like there are people walking down the street whose lives will be altered irrevocably after this and he has no ability he's incapable of even internalizing that idea that message until he's in the front seat of a convertible with Paul Bettany.

10:13And he asked Paul Bettany if he's going to get fired. And Paul Bettany was like, yeah. And then he starts crying in the bathroom. And you're like, okay, well. You know, but I think in some ways that is, like if you think about the sort of the section of the American dream that is supposed to be being a Wall Street guy, right? Like he's the guinea pig for that imploding and what that means. The only bit of Penn Badgley's sort of understanding reality that ever really happens in this movie is when he mentions towards the beginning of the movie that he's massively overpaid for just like moving money, my numbers around on a spreadsheet, which he is.

10:54And he's like, well, OK, you at least you understand that much, little boy. But like, you know, after that, there's levels. There is a genius moment where when he's crying in the bathroom, Simon Baker walks into the bathroom. And Simon Baker is one of these, like, you know, he's higher up. I don't remember what his actual position is. He's basically the head of the investment bank. Okay. So, yeah. So he's much higher up, obviously. And he's shaving in the bathroom. He's getting ready for, like, this awful but massive momentous day that they're about to have. And Pim Badgley just sees him. he's you know Simon Baker shaving and he just he cries and he says this is all I've ever wanted to do and Simon Baker just goes really and keeps on just keeps on shaving yeah like like this is your moment dude to like show a little bit of sympathy for one of your no no I'm just gonna keep on shaving like you know you are you are nothing to me and that's how he gets to where he is he's like the boy wonder he's like 40 years old he's in charge of everyone he's the person who happily will throw Demi more under the bus if he needs to.

11:59Yeah. And he also just, like, understands the reality. I think he probably as much or possibly even more than anyone else understands what's at stake, but then also just is sort of bloodless about it and being like, well, if this is what we need to do, this is what we need to do.

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13:40Rates as of January 1st, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com. There's like a part of the sort of framing of this movie that we didn't say, which is that it starts, the first scene is of this bank doing, you know, sort of mass layoffs. And the earliest sort of piece of plot or story that we get is Stanley Tucci, who is, he was in charge of the risk assessment group on that particular floor, is laid off. And he's the one who sort of tips everyone off to the notion that the models that they were using to assess their risk are wrong and that they're maybe over leveraged, right?

14:25But he just, he couldn't figure out the model. So he relies on Zachary Quinto to figure out the model. And there is an undercurrent of all these sort of different tensions throughout the movie where you have different characters who are caring about real people, different characters who are just so out of touch with everyday people, and then all these sort of shades in between. And then you also have this sort of bookend of ruthlessness, right? You start off with this character who was let go, who actually had the key to letting this company know that something really, really bad was going to come.

14:57And because they let him go, they shut off his phone, they take away all of his things. And when they find out that they're, you know, at the sort of start of a crisis, they need him back. They need him back partially at first because they want to double check some things. But also what they really need is they need for him to be quiet so that he doesn't rat out that they're about to do this fire sale and what all this really means. And so a part of this movie is just the grunt workers trying to find him throughout the city. And when they do finally find him, there is a really lovely conversation that he has with Paul Bettany on the stairs of this new house that Stanley Chuchy just bought.

15:35At one point, Pam Badgley just says, well, I hope he used cash. Well, Bettany's like, you're an asshole. He didn't. And I really love that conversation. But I also, I think I really love that character, A, because I love Stanley Tucci. I mean, he's the best. But also because I think, I don't know, there's layers to the exploitation that carry on here, right? Like they have to sort of continue to exploit workers so that they can exploit other people so that they can keep themselves safe. I look at this differently. Yeah. For one thing, I don't think that bringing Stanley Tucci into a conference room for a day and paying him a million dollars to sit in a chair and do nothing all day is that exploitative of anything.

16:25Well, what if the stakes were, you know, we're not going to pay you severance? They are making him do it. But it's not like he is really being exploited or there's a lot of downside. There are worse ways to be exploited. There are worse ways to be exploited than be paid a million dollars for a day's work. But also, there was this thing that you were talking about, like the broader consequences and the little people and this kind of thing. And I think one of the things I really like about this film is that it doesn't do the thing that, say, the big short did, which was try to. Have seen him as in a bathtub?

17:05No. Well, yeah. But what it doesn't do is try to explain that this crisis that originated in Wall Street has repercussions to mom and pop and people are getting thrown out of their homes. And, you know, people are losing everything. There's like none of that in this movie. And no one talks about that. No one can really see that coming yet where we are. exactly quinto just has a one-off line that's like these people don't know what's about to happen and that's it that's all we get but but like even in his mind he's like you know the markets are going to fall and the people with like investments are going to lose money which you know which is sort of maybe if you think back to when the financial crisis happened in in 2008 what you remembered in 2008 was the stock market crash of 2000 right and the stock market crash of 2000 felt like a really big deal in sort of 2007 2008 before we had the big crash of 2008 in hindsight it was kind of a nothing burger people had money and they didn't have money and they kept on going but there was not the huge um societal disruption that you saw from a financial crisis because 2000 was not a financial crisis in 2008 was a financial crisis so no one in 2008 going into the crisis which is when this movie is set really understands what happens in a financial crisis because no one has been through it no one could saw no one but no one saw what was going to happen and all they could deal with was like the furthest they could look forward in time was like tomorrow or maybe like a week from now they can't look forward you know six months from now and evictions and people don't even really talk about mortgages They only talk about mortgage-backed securities, right?

18:55So it really is quite contained within the small world of Wall Street rather than trying to open out the frame to all of America and to all of the world and to all of the devastation that ends up happening. It keeps it close. It keeps it, as you said, within like 24 hours. It's a small story set at the beginning of the crisis, which is not trying to make a bigger point. And the emotional heart and the sort of like, you know, the human heart of the story is really just, you know, Kevin Spacey losing his dog. Yeah, what I really like about the movie is that very in line with what you're saying, it's just about people making decisions.

19:45Like it is really at the heart of it, it is just about people making decisions. and I think what I love about the Stanley Tucci character are the decisions that maybe he's coerced to make or maybe he makes on his own accord but that he's making them, once again, not considering other... This is the one character that you feel like would be like barn burning and be like, I hate this place because you mistreat people but he's just like, I hate this place because you mistreated me. And that layer I think is very, very specific and I like that the movie doesn't try to shoot above that and there's this great...

20:17I mean, Stanley Chuchu is just so good at a redirect, right? Like, he'll have a conversation with someone. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he'll just say some throwaway line that actually turns into a sort of, I don't know, a different story. and there's this moment on the stoop with Paul Bettany where he's just like, did I ever tell you I built a bridge? And then he starts talking about how he saved the members of these two towns like thousands of years off their life just by building this bridge and so it cut down the time that they would have to spend in their cars. And he doesn't follow up on, Paul Bettany doesn't ask him why he said that, he doesn't follow up on why he said that, but I think it really portrays into this idea of how he personally feels Like he's given so much and has gotten so little.

21:01Mind you, like you said earlier, he's gotten millions of dollars, right? He's gotten millions and he's well aware of that, which is why he doesn't immediately say yes to the offer of lots of money to go and sit in a room. He's like, I have plenty of money. He does obviously feel that he could have been making the world a better place. Did I tell you that I built a bridge? The bridge is clearly this symbol of like the road not traveled. you can be improving people's lives or you can be destroying people's lives and guess what you wound up destroying people's lives instead of improving them um there was one other thing you said earlier though which i wanted to talk about which was when you said that he was like the guy who could have stopped this from happening or that people should have listened to or if he found it out earlier something you know not so much like he like again we have various throwaway lines and not and not like that bridge thing is actually a quite long yeah like two-page monologue whereas like there are a little more throwaway lines that you're hearing from um kevin spacey and from uh demi more saying like we we warned about yeah and but i think everyone on everyone on the trading floor most notably kevin spacey has been acutely aware yes of the amount of leverage that they've been running and the whole problem of the originated distribute model and all of the rest of it for a long time.

22:28And part of the problem is that they were so busy making money, they deliberately didn't listen to the risk people. Yeah. And all he does, he just tips, he just tips Zachary Quinto off. Right. And I think the thing that he maybe specifically tips him off to isn't like, oh, I just found out that there was a problem, but I maybe we specifically figured out what exactly is wrong, like that the model is wrong. And I, you know, and apparently you need a rocket scientist to then finish that model and actually run it and figure it out. But yeah, I think, yeah, they make it very clear that whether it started with him or with anyone else, that people have been talking about the fact that they maybe had a problem on their hands for quite some time.

23:11And this is one of the deep truths of Wall Street, which you see in this movie is that ostensibly the job of the risk management function is to control the amount of risk that the bank is taking. But in reality, it's the people who are making the money, the traders and the CEO who determine that rather than the risk managers, who wind up being shunted off to the side and laid off in layoffs and generally being ignored until they're needed as a sacrificial lamb of someone to blame when things go wrong. Yeah. I love that this movie didn't spend too much time on a trading floor or with traders trying to sell people things.

23:57We get sold things and pitched things all day, every day, as consumers, as people just living. And I like that so much of this movie was actually about people putting their heads together in conference rooms to discuss a problem and so little about like i don't know uh 20 minutes of them actually trying to sell like this these mbs assets right yeah there's there's a there's this um a wall street movie cliche of all of these guys with like two phones screaming at each other or you know the the climactic scene in trading places where they're on the trading floor you know doing you know they're selling and then they're buying and you know and we open after the market's closed.

24:41This movie begins after the market closes and they do all the layoffs like after 4pm after the market has closed. And then only at the very end of the movie do we get the open, the market open the following morning. We get some wonderful, wonderful, beautifully written dialogue of like Paul Badney trying to sell bonds to his counterparts at other banks. My loss is your gain and all this kind of stuff. but that comes at the end it isn't it isn't made sexy it's because we understand all of these people are talking themselves out of their own jobs yeah um it's more sort of heartbreaking than like this is not one of those movies that is ever going to make someone want to go on to wall street right in the way that's gonna make a bunch of pen like wall street the movie yeah was designed by Oliver Stone to be this sort of cautionary tale of don't go onto Wall Street.

25:37And then this, you know, greed is good speech that Michael Douglas gives becomes this sort of rallying cry for a whole generation of kids who then go onto Wall Street. And they're like, yeah, greed is good. And they like take it unironically. Like you, no one is going to sort of take margin call unironically and go, yeah, that's the kind of institution that I want to work for. Yeah. Yeah, it's not, is it? I don't like that. No. I didn't like this vision of life for myself. In fact, it seemed really awful. And I think a part of it, a part of what is really effective about it is that it spends most of its time between four walls, right?

26:18Like there is so little time outside. And most of it is spent in conference rooms, strip clubs, you know, just like in rooms. and so it feels really confining and I think that that is a large part of the point. It also is so not tantalizing. There is not a single moment of this movie where I feel like I would want to live even a single iota of that life. Which is why you're a culture writer. Yeah, yeah. That's why I'm not actually making millions of dollars. But that's, I think, a good place to wrap it up. We're going to, this is not the last time we're going to talk about movies. No, no, no. We actually are going to talk about personal finance on the next episode of Money on Film.

27:02And so this one is where you're going to explain it all to me, because this is all going to be about dating and shit, about which I know nothing. Unfortunately, I know maybe a little too much. I'd like to know less about dating. If anyone wants to help with that, that'd be great. But for this one, I think that's it for Money on Film. Let's catch us next time. Thanks for listening. Thanks for doing this with me, Felix. I can't wait for the next episode. I also want to thank Andrew Harding for arranging all of this, Micah Phillips for producing this video, Benjamin Frisch for producing the audio some of you might be hearing, and Merit Jacobs for engineering.