Coated with chlorophyll

Margin Call

Crit

Ahhh, this is why we go to the movies, to escape for a couple of hours into a strange world where thrilling and terrifying and implausible catastrophes occur, then to return to the real world secure in the knowledge that those things could never happen here.

Remember the old joke--I think I had a version of it on a Flip Wilson record when I was a kid--about the guy who picks up his buddy at the airport after housesitting for him, telling him that everything's OK, except that his dog died. The returning vacationer is, naturally, shocked and distressed, and asks to know how it happened, thus triggering a sort of reverse house-that-jack-built narrative in which each disaster ensued from an even bigger disaster, culminating in the housesitter's admission that the house itself has burned to the ground. Well, that joke is as good a metaphor as any for the 2008 economic meltdown, and here at least we get to see the guy (Kevin Spacey, as the Wall Street [actually, inexplicably, 34th Street] sales boss with a conscience, for what that's worth) burying his dog. We also see his ex-wife, played by Mary McDonnell, which I mention only because I love Mary McDonnell (in my current consciousness she's the cancer-doomed accidental president of the airborne Caprican civilization in the first season of Battlestar Galactica) and because she must have the best agent in Hollywood, because she's in just this one, final, maybe 3-minute scene, yet she gets seventh billing, ahead of such major players in the story (and bigger names) as Demi Moore and Stanley Tucci. What's up with that? Not complaining, just sayin'.

Anyway, this is a tightly written, tautly acted and directed gloss on the packaging, discovery, and dispersal of what Jeremy Irons's CEO calls (this is from memory, but it's pretty close) "the biggest, most odoriferous bag of excrement in the history of capitalism."

Just one bigger mystery than how all that could have gone down: what sort of accent is Paul Bettany going for? He's a fine actor, so I assume he's not just lost, as he seems to be, between Manchester and the Jersey (New Jersey, i.e.) Shore, but it's hard to see how someone with that yobbish/thuggish delivery could ever have risen to the position he holds, or how anyone in such a position for 10 years wouldn't have rid himself of it. Bizarre.