Movie Mashup: Margin-the-Pooh
This installment of the mashup features two movies with no crossover in audience. Margin Call is a fable for grownups, a vain attempt to explain the recent financial crash, and how the vicious inequalities of American life are allowed to endure. Winnie-the-Pooh is a song-and-dance romp, and a wholehearted embrace of nostalgia facilitated by a company whose sole purpose is to breed a new generation of fans so that its intellectual property may continue to be profitable. But in both, the cast of characters comprises emotionally stunted figures, easily definable by a single personality trait. The difference is that in Winnie-the-Pooh, the creatures are in fact aspects of Christopher Robin’s own psyche. In Margin Call, they’re just asshats.
Margin Call pulls together a rock solid cast to essentially reenact the Lehmann Brothers scandal –- the most famous of the many catastrophes which we collectively call the Crash of 2008. It plays out over the course of approximately 24 hours, an attempt to heighten tension and provide the illusion of drama. We watch as cold-hearted people yell at each other, blame each other, and devise strategies to keep themselves afloat, all at the expense of everyone else. They range in their degree of asshattery, of course. The young traders are merely self-interested (they want to keep their jobs). The middle mangers are sweating because they don’t want their previous negligence discovered. The leader is the real work of art, an insanely wealthy man who looks down onto the streets of New York, cheerfully heedless of the chaos he is about to unleash on the humanity below.
Now, a cast of desperate sociopaths trapped in close quarters should be a slam dunk in terms of entertainment value. Worked in Glengarry Glen Ross. Worked in Usual Suspects. Doesn’t work here. Since we know exactly what will happen, and we certainly know that no one will suffer or go to jail as a result of their actions, there’s no reason to get worried about the fate of these characters.
Winnie-the-Pooh is also a conscious return to the past, but not to the darkness of 2008. This movie returns to the Hundred Acre Wood to animate – in glorious 2D – a few more chapters of the classic Pooh stories. There’s no revisionism here, no attempt to update, and only a very few tweaks to AA Milne’s version. Pooh and friends simply meander through the Wood, having exactly the adventures you’d expect them to (especially if you remember the books). Eeyore loses his tail, and many replacements are suggested. Pooh gets hungry. Christopher Robin goes missing. A new creature is encountered.
Which is not to say that the story is without a larger message. In fact, the heart of the story demonstrates the danger of rule by experts. When Pooh finds Christopher Robin missing, and only a scrawled note left behind, he asks Owl to read it. Owl’s somewhat alarmist interpretation leads to the conclusion that a Backson has kidnapped Christopher Robin. A song explains the gravity of the situation, and then the animals head out to the Wood to lay a trap for the Backson. Their dread of the Backson’s imminent appearance is considerably more riveting than anything that happens in Margin Call. But the various plot threads are less important than the characters’ reactions to them. Owl’s pompous behavior escalates a problem. Piglet is scared...well, everything. Tigger bounces in and out of trouble. Rabbit orders others around. And Pooh’s gluttonous love of hunny is the closest we get to a fatal flaw.
In fact, the reactions of all the animals in the Hundred Acre Wood are more relatable (certainly more palatable) than that of the humans in Margin Call. I identify with all the characters of Winnie-the-Pooh, partly because i grew up with them, and partly because they are all representative of various aspects of the human psyche. You really can’t not identify with most of them – unless you’re a sociopath. Eeyore’s pessimism counters Tigger’s bounding optimism. Rabbit’s dictatorial nature highlights Piglet’s meekness. Pooh, of course, illustrates the naiveté and impressionable nature of a child -- he’s Christopher Robin if Christopher Robin never matured at all. Pooh is driven by hunger, by curiosity, by fear, and by love – frequently all at the same time, and that’s why people still like this Silly Old Bear. He’s just like us.
I could barely identify with most of the cast of Margin Call, perhaps because they were all essentially sociopathic. The most sympathetic among them, a tired Kevin Spacey, who is the only person who really pushes back against the titanically persuasive head of the firm (Jeremy Irons) when he decides to let the world burn to save the firm itself. Even Spacey’s objections are less moral than practical: he fears the fallout after selling toxic assets because he knows that salesmen can’t sell shit twice. And he’s the closest thing to a hero. The other characters merely scramble to cover their asses, with varying degrees of success (with success defined as “maintaining a six figure income”). They engage in only the slightest reflection on the larger issues about to hit the proverbial fan, such as the fact that the firm’s stupid investment strategy will leave thousands of people homeless and jobless, not to mention destroy confidence in the system they themselves rely on.
Obviously, Margin Call is realistic. The people involved the Crash of 2008 were that shortsighted and petty. They sold us all down the river. The fact that we all know this is, oddly, what renders Margin Call ineffective. It’s too real, and too depressing.
But its worst offense is that it is boring. Dullsville. Snoozapalooza. How boring was it? I saw it on opening night. Someone actually fell asleep in the theater about 30 minutes before the end, and no one else in the theater tried to wake him up. That dude’s snoring was more entertaining than the film. True story.1 And while Margin Call wasn’t as eye-stabbingly awful as Spider, it was still a vast disappointment, especially considering the time, money and talent that went into it (kinda like Wall Street itself, come to think of it). I’d recommend watching stuffed animals instead.
1You’re thinking that not everyone heard that dude snoring. Yes, yes they did. Margin Call is a really quiet movie in the second half (the yelling happens earlier). This is only a problem because the movie is also dull.