Financial crisis thriller launches Berlinale competition (Feature)

By Andrew McCathie Feb 11, 2011, 16:34 GMT

Berlin - A thriller from US director JC Chandor about a Wall Street investment bank pushed to the brink of disaster as the global financial crisis unfolded in 2008 opened on Friday the competition for the Berlin Film Festival's top honours.

Starring Kevin Spacey, Demi Moore and Jeremy Irons, Margin Call tells the story of the battle waged by the bank's staff from the top floors of a Manhattan skyscraper to try keep the bank from collapsing.

Speaking at a press conference in Berlin marking the film's premiere, Chandor said he did not believe that the cause of the financial crisis was greed on a large-scale.

Instead he said: 'What the script for me is about is not excessive greed on any one individual's part, but it was the greed on a very small scale of the whole population, certainly in the United States.'

Set over a frantic 24-hour period, Margin Call is Chandor's debut feature film.

The film's story also traces the plight of the US banking house Lehman Brothers, whose collapse in September 2008 was a defining moment in the financial crisis that ultimately plunged the world into its deepest recession in a generation.

Zachary Quinto also stars in the film as a young analyst who unlocks information that could prove fatal to the bank's survival. As a result, he helps to set off the movie's roller-coaster ride through the world of high finance.

Margin Call is one of 16 movies competing for the Berlinale's Golden Bear for best picture.

The 61st Berlinale was opened on Thursday with a gala screening of the remake of the sixties' western classic True Grit from US directors Joel and Ethan Coen. True Grit is not sompetition in Berlin.

In Margin Call, Spacey plays a trading boss attempting to offload toxic debts despite the broader financial market repercussions of the move. The stakes are high for Spacey's character as the bank's management launches a campaign of mass layoffs.

As the firm's chief risk officer, Moore's character also serves to underline the tough role faced by women working in the male-dominated world of Wall Street.

But what Chandor wanted to show in Margin Call was that those caught up in the crisis were simply ordinary people who fell victim to their own false sense of priorities.

'In a lot of cases, these are regular people who have regular jobs who aren't making gazillions of dollars and who have to follow orders, and that's the crux of the morality of the piece and why I found it so fascinating,' said Spacey.

Irons plays the boardroom boss ruthlessly laying down the law to save the bank from imploding.

He is also the closest thing in the movie to the legendary Gordon Gekko character, originally made famous in Oliver Stone's account of 1980's capitalism in Wall Street.

'My role was an amoral man who just wanted to keep the ship afloat,' said Irons.

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