aw this last night. Set at a Wall Street firm on the night in 2008 when the leaders realize that changes in the market will wipe them out if they don’t immediately stop selling the products that have been making them all rich, the movie centers on the moral dilemma – recognized by some characters but dismissed by others – that they face in unwinding their positions, saving themselves but shifting the pain to others.
The movie finds a way to hold the mirror up to our civilization, showing how we are all complicit in a collective ‘dream’ (one character says at one point, in response to another who says he feels like he is in a ‘dream’, ‘Funny, it seems like I just woke up’). The dream is the illusion of easy, risk-managed wealth that the financial markets manufacture, again and again, since the emergence of capital markets 200 years ago, until the illusion morphs overnight into a panic. Reality intervenes, fear takes over, and the ‘survivor’ is the guy who first reaches the lifeboat. So there are no villains in this movie, just people, richly drawn, beautifully acted characters realized by some of our best actors who relish the opportunity to show what they can do given a killer script and enough screen time between lines to actually be the people they are portraying.