Finally, a realistic portrayal of Wall Street

All of this is conveyed not by anybody who actually works with him but by two women who have been brought in for the purpose of doing just this. The rest of "Margin Call" is the story of the next 24 hours, after a younger risk analyst completes the work begun by his laid-off boss only to discover that, guess what? Their trusty, money-making formula has been blown up by real-world events, and it's all about to come down.

What these earlier movies have in common is a tendency to view the financial system as either an extension of ordinary villainy or, as in the case of "Too Big to Fail", a grand beast of mythical proportions, like the monster/alien/tidal wave in a disaster flick. "Margin Call", by contrast, depicts the many banalities that make for a financial meltdown, and the near-silent panic that sets in. Finance is depicted as slippery and amorphous, a creation of not just the banks but of a whole society oriented toward easy consumption. The unnamed bank in question reacts to this system, embraces it, resents it, exploits it and succumbs to it. The market is depicted as a mechanism in its truest form, not so much spitefully inhuman as routinely dehumanizing. That "Margin Call" is one of the most restrained and realistic portrayals of Wall Street is also what makes it the most startling.