Five Best Business Movies of 2011
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"Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer." "It's not personal, it's business." And of course, "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse." The Godfather series comprise the greatest business movies ever put to screen and they are likely to remain so for a long time to come. Certainly no film released in 2011 matched the series for insight, quotable lines, and sheer gripping suspense. Still, there were some good (though also some bad) business-themed films released during the calendar year, and in a couple of cases among the five offered here, some truly great entertainments on the subject of business and finance.
Probably the best is Margin Call, distributed by Lionsgate (NYSE: LGF). With an estimated budget of $3.4 million, its US gross was a mere $5.11 million, not much to add to Lionsgate's coffers, but which at least does contribute to the company's prestige. Lionsgate is a company with a wide palette of releases from art house fare such as Oscar-winner Crash ($98,410,061 worldwide gross starting in 2005) to franchise films such as the Saw series that for a while was the company's bread and butter. Written and directed by newcomer J. C. Chandor, who has familial ties with Wall Street, Margin Call boasts a superb cast including Zachary Quinto (who also co-produced), Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Simon Baker, Demi Moore, and Stanley Tucci. Taking place in the course of one day in 2008, Margin Call looks at the financial implosion via the growing crisis within one fictional investment company, beginning when Tucci as a fired chief risk management analyst bequeaths on his way out the door to his assistant Quinto his findings about the company's precarious position. What's striking about the film is its sympathetic portrayal of men who are in over their heads and don't even fully understand the financial instruments in play. These guys aren't merely cartoon evil bastards (well, some are). Margin Call came out on DVD on Tuesday, December 20, 2011.
Following close behind is Moneyball, based on Michael Lewis's book about Billy Beane and the Oakland A's. Moneyball was released by Columbia Pictures, a subsidiary of Sony Pictures Entertainment, itself a sub of Sony (NYSE: SNE). With an estimated budget of $50 million, Moneyball has so far grossed an adequate (in relation to cost) $104 million worldwide, and may well garner star Brad Pitt an Oscar nomination. Set during the 2001 baseball season, the film chronicles the efforts of general manager Beane to resuscitate the A's by following the precepts of a Sabermetrician, a composite character played by Jonah Hill. Both the book and the film, which is surprisingly serious and "inside baseball" about baseball, show how difficult it is to introduce new ideas into a rigid business model or to members of an organization entrenched in their antique world view, as numerous websites from Forbes on down have suggested about both works. Moneyball comes to DVD on Tuesday, January 10, 2012.
Cedar Rapids offered a change of pace and some gentle ribbing of the cutting loose attendant on conventioneering. Ed Helms starred as a small-town insurance agent sent on his first trip "abroad," to a bland motor hotel in Cedar Rapids where he encounters fellow salespersons John C. Reilly and Anne Heche, twin poles of frivolity and hedonism. Unfortunately, what happened in Cedar Rapids stayed in Cedar Rapids. The film, budgeted probably – that is, by wild guess – in the area of $10 to $20 million, only garnered $6.8 million (as of May 20, 2011) for Fox Searchlight, whose parent company, after working through a bunch of higher subsidiaries, is News Corporation (NASDAQ: NWS). The film was released on DVD on June 21, 2011, and doesn't appear to have made a dent on the home front, either, with 69,934 units sold for an additional $1,163,199. Produced by Alexander Payne and directed by Miguel Arteta of The Good Girl, Cedar Rapids is that brand of gentle and amusing observational comedy that characterizes Payne's other, prestige film of the year …
… The Descendants, also for Fox Searchlight. This film, about Matt King a Hawaiian businessman, played by George Clooney, experiencing crises both in his family life and in a big land deal, seems to have clicked with audiences. With a stronger, or at least less ephemeral story than Cedar Rapids (The Descendants is based on a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings ), the film links King's family problems with his business identity in a clever manner, though the film isn't particularly "cinematic" in style or look – more like a TV show, but that is characteristic of Payne's focus. By the end of the year the film had earned $40 million plus, off of a budget probably upwards of $20 million, and has already been nominated for numerous Golden Globe and other award-giving bodies, which bodes well for its Oscar chances and its profitability post Oscar night.
One of the best art house films of the year is Ralph Fiennes' directorial debut, Coriolanus, from Shakespeare's play. Distributed by the privately owned (and apparently troubled) Weinstein Company, it was budgeted at $10 million, and though officially dated a 2011 film, will receive wide release in the United States this year, on January 20, after year-end cameo appearances in New York City and Los Angeles for Oscar consideration purposes. The film also stars Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave, and the ubiquitous Jessica Chastain, and Fiennes has modernized the play, with the help of screenwriter John Logan (Rango, Gladiator), shading it in the hues of modern warfare via the Gulf War. But as a tale of a military leader cast out of his own city, only to turn on it and fighting his way back in, the film turns into a bloodier version of the Steve Jobs story, banished from Apple only to return and take it back, as recounted in detail by Walter Isaacson's recent biography.
The more traditional "businessman as cold and soulless" theme is found in Lars von Trier's otherwise terrific if downbeat Melancholia – though I don't think von Trier found his subject to be a bummer. Released in the U.S. by Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban's forward-thinking Magnolia Pictures, a division of the privately held 2929 Entertainment, the film has so far made about seven million dollars off a budget of $11.1 million, since it was released on video on demand on October 7th, and then in limited theatrical release on November 11th, that after having won a Best Actress prize for Kirsten Dunst at the Cannes Film Festival in May. As screenwriter and director, von Trier seems to take the side, so to speak, of Dunst's character, a victim of depression who ruins her wedding day in the film's first half, but then cheers up and welcomes the apocalypse when a planet drifts toward earth in the second half. Beautifully photographed (by Manuel Alberto Claro) and more poetic than depressing, Melancholia's "businessman bad guy" is Dunst's brother-in-law, played by Kiefer Sutherland. He's a billionaire who has his own golf course next door, and seems to be the only stable member of the family, where Dunst's mother (Charlotte Rampling) is a bitter divorcee and her father (John Hurt) an unreliable partier. Stable, that is (SPOILER ALERT!), until the unstopability of the approaching planet drives him to an out-of-left-field suicide. What would Don Corleone have done? Probably taken out someone else instead.
Fool blogger D. K. Holm does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this entry.
