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Metro News - November 2011
Baker is on call
The Mentalist’s Simon Baker takes a stab at playing a soulless Wall
Street wizard in Margin Call Shares
his thoughts on greed and morality
Simon
Baker’s affable, open Patrick Jane on the TV phenom The Mentalist is light
years away from the mannered, restrained wizard of Wall Street he plays in the
financial thriller Margin Call. Jared Cohen leads a team of self-serving
execs to find a way to cover his company’s worthless leverage in the first days
of the economic meltdown.
You play a seemingly soulless man caught in one
of the worst disasters of our time.
If there is any parallel I can draw in the journey, my character is a
device. We follow young Seth, Penn Badgley, and the young analyst played
by Zachary Quinto and Kevin Spacey and a little of Demi Moore on emotional
trips. Jared is largely a device, like the last scene that I have with Penn.
Here is the young guy that wants to be Gordon Gekko and a hotshot, and he’s
definitely a product of that mould. I thought it was important to make a deal
with the devil. He’s not going to stand down and show signs of weaknesses in
the offices with coworkers but that affected quality is what I was looking at,
the protective shell. That’s how they disconnect themselves emotionally.
It’s an interesting view of the crash, seeing
not from the victims’ point of view, but from the perpetrators. Are we
meant to feel sympathy?
I don’t think we’re meant to feel sympathy but I think that what it does
reflect is that they are human and fallible. It’s just too easy to pin an idea
of them being soulless, inhuman people. I don’t think we should feel sympathy,
but understand that greed really is a part of human nature and it can take over
and this is where we see it. Deep down inside Kevin Spacey there is a lot of
soul. His humanity sort of wins out, and in my case you can see vulnerability a
tiny bit but he never lets it show.
Morality is the core of the film, the idea being that amorality in
business works. Writer director J. C. Chandor is the son of a guy that worked
his whole career in the finance industry and he’s a pretty folksy kind of a
guy. He’s obviously going to impart his own soulful kind of approach to what
that world is and his take on it and play with the idea of it being a morality
tale. But he doesn’t. At some points it is heavy handed, but there are some
grace notes and delicate notes, that are hard to verbalize that just land
sometimes. There are certain moments, particularly Paul Bettany’s
performance.
http://www.metronews.ca/winnipeg/scene/article/1023389--baker-is-on-call
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