Watched Margin Call last weekend. It was kinda meh. OK, but didn’t love it. No Wall Street. Not even Money Never Sleeps. But I like Paul Bettany and his character. And he has a small dialogue towards the end that, IMHO, rings quite true:
“If you really want to do this with your life you have to believe that you’re necessary. And you are. People want to live like this in their cars and their big fucking houses that they can’t even pay for? Then you’re necessary. The only reason they all get to continue living like kings is because we’ve got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off and the whole world gets really fucking fair really fucking quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don’t. They want what we have to give them, but they also want to play innocent and pretend they have no idea where it came from. That’s more hypocrisy than I’m willing to swallow. Fuck them. Fuck normal people.”
Many would probably see it as a greedy bastard banker speech. And it is. But I also see it as relatively factual view point that the average person doesn’t want to admit to being part of. Gordon Gekko touched on that in Money Never Sleeps too. Although I much preferred his Teldar Paper speech :)
