For me, this is a must see movie.  I saw it on Friday but continue to think about it intensely.

For the mass audience, Margin Call is probably not so much a must see movie because the film is an exercise in restrained storytelling in terms of dialogue and plot coupled with intensely calculated attention to form.

Forget Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci, Paul Bettany, Zachary Quinto, Penn Badgley, and Mary McDonnell – though there are some terrific performances here.

Cinematography is the star of Margin Call.

Film students could write compelling papers on the use of framing and focus alone.  Both are used to create aesthetically beautiful images that advance the story by creating spatial relationships emphasizing the primacy and isolation of the individual in the high-powered world of finance as it beings to spiral out of control.

Margin Call takes place over a 24-hour period (talk about Aristotelian unities) as the financial crash of 2008 is about to unfold.

If you know a thing or two about derivatives, you’ll appreciate the film on one level (and cringe as the flippant use of formulas to manipulate markets without considered concern for those affected), and if you haven’t followed the crisis and its genesis carefully at all, you’ll still get the gist of what is going on (greed guides these financiers, and that is not a good thing for the rest of us).

All of that is well and good, but I was utterly mesmerized by the images, lost in them sometimes from shot-to-shot, absorbing as much as I could before one image replaced another on the screen.

Margin Call is the type of film I admire more than love, but I admire it greatly for engaging all of my cinema senses, making me think carefully about the choices writer-director J.C. Chandor has made in crafting the film, and telling a different type of financial crash story.

Where Charles Ferguson’s award-winning documentary Inside Job (another terrific film) makes me think and makes me angry by indicting the system that allowed (encouraged!) the collapse, Margin Call makes me see people (clearly and in isolation because of the selective focus!) who are reckless and greedy and ambitious and, yes, selfish, but people nonetheless.

For all of the attention to the formal elements of filmmaking in Margin Call, Chandor confines his judgment of the assorted characters to that aesthetic realm.  The narrative elements leave those assessments to the viewer, and the film is stronger because of this approach – the explicitness of point-of-view in the cinematography is offset by the implicitness of the point-of-view in the story.

After all, we know these are “bad guys” and don’t have to be told so again and again by the filmmaker.  That sort of spot on storytelling would diminish the power of the film.

My friend, a business professor by training, emailed me weeks ago to see when I could go with him to see this film.  He was less than enthralled because (I think) he wanted more plot complications and (perhaps) more character development.

I maintain that the character development is there but implicit, wedged into the interstices of the story, and who needs a plot riddled with conventions constructed in the formulaic way when there are such formal beauties to behold as the elements that guide our understanding of the story.

After all, as I tell my students repeatedly, form and content are inextricably linked.