The Last Days of Lehman Brothers

This is a docu-drama about the 2008 US banking crisis made rather quickly by the BBC hence it's a little rough around the edges.

Although other films have subsequently been made, this one was first out of the blocks.

Lehman Brothers is a bank that has been in business since before the American Civil War. However in September 2008 they were in meltdown. Over the weekend the US Treasury Secretary (James Cromwell) has assembled the best of Wall Street in downtown Manhattan to save the banks from going under from its toxic assets.

They need to save the capitalists system from the Russian and Chinese.

Of course a lot of the others assembled in the room have their own toxic assets lurking behind them. We have drama, recriminations, plotting and even back stabbing, as they go about to save Lehman Brothers and maybe even their own skins.

James Cromwell as Hank Paulson cajoles them and at one points begs them to get things together.

Given that this drama might look dense and complicated because of the labyrinth nature of the deals that caused the crisis. It is raw human edged emotions that carry this drama through.

At the end we are left with shallow but rich people who still ended up doing rather nicely for themselves. All of the banks apart from Lehman got bailed out. After all Paulsen was the ultimate Wall Street insider.

The cast is a mixture of North American and British actors (playing Americans.) Cromwell given his size towers above the others. Even though politically he is the polar opposite with Paulsen's views, he does convey the urgency of the situation very well.