It’s a more than plausible scenario.  In J.C. Chandor’s new film Margin Call, we are witness to the night before the markets crashed in 2008, sending our country into an economic tailspin from which it is only beginning to show signs of recovery.  As anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention is aware, the mortgage industry wrote a lot of bad mortgages, investment firms traded them back and forth, often overleveraging their assets by enormous margins and being forced to sell it off for pennies on the dollar.

The tagline of the film is ‘Be first, be smarter, or cheat.’ The film opens with massive layoffs to an unnamed brokerage house with Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci), the head of risk assessment, getting the axe.  As he leaves the building, he passes a jump drive with a project he has been working on to Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), telling him it is something important he just can’t quite put together.  That night, Peter figures out what Dale had missed and realizes something that seemingly should have been obvious: the firm was ridiculously overleveraged and beyond the historical parameters for risk by quite a large margin.

Peter calls his boss (Paul Bettany) who quickly calls head of the floor, Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey).  Quickly realizing the implications of Peter’s discovery, the follows late-night/early-morning meetings up to the top, with CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons).  Despite the protests of Rogers, the decision is made to sell off everything at the open of business even though the firm knows that its holdings are ultimately worthless.  Tuld says he won’t cheat, and while he knows he has smart people, it’s easier to be first.  Get rid of it now, live to fight another day.

Rather than being a mere indictment on the financial industry, whose shortsightedness and greed have become easy if justified targets, writer/director Chandor forces his audience to simultaneously sympathize with Spacey’s character, who thinks the firm should not do something so underhanded which will ultimately eradicate customer trust, and to understand the opposite view embodied by Tuld and division head Jared Cohen (Simon Baker) in which the trades aren’t illegal and so should be burned off as much as possible as soon as the market opens to protect the firm.

Despite the fact that I often view the financial industry as being an industry in which nothing is created, I don’t know that I really think what Tuld did was wrong.  For the country certainly, but for someone responsible to his company and shareholders to protect them as much as possible, I don’t know that a flexibly-minded person doesn’t have some understanding.

It’s easy to be critical of Wall Street.  It’s understandable.  It’s almost entirely warranted.  But Chandor presents these characters as real people, even if none of them are particularly likable, and as events unfold we are witness to the cutthroat world of finance and the sorts of people who thrive within it.