Business on the Big Screen

by Kevin Gardner

The business world is a dynamic place, rich with powerful and energetic ideas that inspire. It is a place where liability mingles with equity, and where everybody's got their eyes on the bottom line. Money is what makes this world go around, and it's even been implied that money never sleeps. Is greed good? Is philanthropy a requisite of a successful businessperson? Does passion for a project determine one's level of success? Here are three great movies about business, which explore various, disparate characters engaging in the good, the bad, and the ugly side of Wall Street and beyond. Consider this your spoiler alert, and enjoy!

1. The Pursuit of Happyness

In this biographical drama, a man overcomes great odds to secure a stockbroker position at an eminent brokerage firm. Now that's a pretty good logline, but it has no heart, and this is a business movie with a heart. It's an underdog story with a protagonist that you want to succeed. Chris Gardner is a salesman who's seen his investment in portable medical supplies wither. There is a lag in his sales pipeline that leads him (and his son) into a series of dire situations. By happenstance, he impresses a partner in the brokerage firm that will give him an unpaid internship, which, despite great odds, earns him gainful employment. This movie is less about dollars and cents and more about a man who strides confidently onto the proverbial playing field with the only three things that he has: his drive and his desperation and his hope. 

2. Margin Call

This insightful glimpse into the world of high finance came on the heels of a financial crisis that left a lot of people wondering about the integrity of some Wall Street firms. This movie doesn't so much have heart as it has a few characters wrestling with their consciences. Over 24 hours, a giant investment bank liquidates as many assets as it is able, including lots of employees, one of whom has discovered that bankruptcy is on the horizon. The audience is privy to emergency midnight boardroom meetings where decisions are made that will have massive implications for the firm, for its employees and for Wall Street itself. It's heady stuff, as even Jeremy Irons, as the CEO who must make the big decisions, instructs his analysts to explain the firm's potentially catastrophic predicament to him as if he were a child. 

Margin Call helps the audience to understand how a giant corporate entity tries to keep itself in the black, ultimately, in this case, at the expense of everybody else. It shows, too, the speed at which Wall Street operates, and how these men and women, from the top down, must make their choices with enormous pressure on their shoulders. 

3. Wall Street

In this classic, a young go-getter named Bud turns to the dark side of the street in order to make himself useful to Gordon Gecko, a cutthroat corporate trader. Bud views Gecko as both a hero and a potential mentor. As he's about to be pushed back out into the cold after briefly impressing Gecko, he gives up some precious information about a company with which he's intimately familiar, and is able to retain his status. Thus begins his foray into insider trading, much to Gecko's delight. This is a coming-of-age story, in which Bud must reconcile his desire for wealth and power with his own sense of decency. The sorts of people who end up penniless and ruined when men like Gecko run their schemes mean nothing to him because he simply refuses to see them as anything but little pieces of a business deal. These are Bud's people, though, and when he sees the potential hurt that he has led them into, he attempts to use his clever brain to thwart Gecko's plans.

Happy Endings?

These movies present a human element amidst the mechanisms of business. They bring up concepts such as morality and empathy. Some characters simply scoff at such notions, but more often than not the audience is shown how individuals are capable of compartmentalizing their actions, and the consequences thereof. Even so, sometimes the good guys win.