The Last Days of Lehman Brothers (2009)

This will be a little off our usual topics, but as it is financial news related I felt I should post it here as well. I originally penned this for the other blog I contribute to, Audio/Visual Anthropology, but the subject matter of the production warrants a place here. If nothing else, it mixes things up a little around here. 


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Normally made-for-TV movies about recent events are full of overacting, simplistic dialog, one-dimensional characters, annoying narrators providing lousy framing devices, and occasional irritating music. The Last Days of Lehman Brothers (from here on TLDOLB) suffers from these typical shortcomings, but not to the extent that some of these endeavors do.

Before continuing, I must preface that I have an unusual interest in the subject matter. If you simply do not care about the financial crisis that was in its most frightening throes about 21 months ago, then there might be no reason to watch this very brief attempt to humanize the cryptic figures behind our financial system's most epic failure. If you are not familiar with the events, there is little to help you. Indeed, there are no explanations saying "This is Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase". When they refer to some of these individuals by first names or last names, you are almost entirely unaware of who they are if you do not follow financial news. Nonetheless, I think that there would be some value in watching it even with no familiarity since this production does depict the weekend in September 2008 that has so profoundly shaped our current world. More importantly, it does so passably. As such, I feel it is worth the investment (excuse my word choice). After all, the run time is only 60 minutes. Unfortunately, the CNBC version is shorter and cuts out some scenes entirely.

The length is strangely enough a small advantage. Most of its ilk run around 100 minutes and often truly do not have that amount of material available so we are inundated with introductions to characters that we will not care about because the slapped together screenplay is too incompetent to make us care. TLDOLB waltzes somewhat into the opposite problem. It starts hot and heavy right in the midst of the maelstrom and often cuts through key moments without really explaining what is going on. Once again, if you followed the crisis there is some inside baseball you might, emphasize might, understand that terse references to other events.