As Arbitrage
opens, hedge fund manager Robert Miller has it all. He's being
interviewed about his successful investment career, he's headed back
from a meeting to arrange the merger of his company with a major
British bank (whose head is played by Vanity Fair editor Graydon
Carter, no less) and he heads home for a birthday celebration,
surrounded by his family in a setting that reflects warmth.
But we learn quickly
that things are not the way they seem. Robert heads off to see his
mistress, a young French woman for whom he's bought an art gallery.
The merger is not progressing as it should, and we discover he's had
to take a $400 million loan to cover a bad investment in Russian
copper mines. And then, late for the opening of a show at the
gallery, Robert takes his mistress for a drive upstate, falls asleep,
and crashes the car. She is dead, and he needs not to be involved. He
finds a pay phone, and calls James, the son of his former driver, who
owes him for the way he helped the family, and him with his own
criminal charges, and gets picked up. He gets home, with bruises and
maybe internal injuries, at 4:30 in the morning. The police,
suspicious of the crash scene, soon track him down, and the pressures
start to mount.
Written by first-time
director Nicholas Jarecki, Arbitrage could be looked at as an
indictment of the rich, or of the system that rewards betting against
people (Miller made a killing forecasting the collapse of the housing
bubble). But Jarecki is not following in the footsteps of his
documentarian brothers Andrew (Capturing the Friedmans) and Eugene
(Why We Fight); he already did that with his first feature, the doc
The Outsider. At times the film recalls an older era of
financial excess, reminding me of Wall Street or
Bonfire Of The Vanities, but
despite the fraud and the accidental death you cannot escape, this
film is far more about the character himself, and about the
way an audience cannot resist taking the side of a handsome hero who
has the odds stacked against him, even when he is guilty, and even
when he is revealed almost soulless underneath his charm.
He's lucky, in this
sense, to have Richard Gere in the lead. Gere's always been
underrated—his Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor for this film
was his fourth nomination for a Globe (he won, oddly enough unless
you recall it's the Golden Globes, for Chicago), but he's
never been nominated for an Oscar or a Bafta mask. Perhaps it's
because of his looks, or the slightly ingratiating way he plays nice.
In fact, there's a lot of Edward Lewis from Pretty Woman, in
Miller at the start. But what Gere brings out are the same qualities
that made his performances in American Gigolo and Internal
Affairs so powerful—a combination of self-absorbed interest and
ruthlessness under the surface. It's his real strength--conveying a reality different from the handsome surface that suggests likeablility, either the blankness of American Gigolo or the true venom of Internal Affairs.
There are moments when
some feeling shows through, and because this is a thriller, he is
allowed a triumph. After all, his first instinct, overcome, was to
call 911 after the crash. He is about to turn himself in, and save
James (a nice performance from Nate Parker) from jail for
obstruction, when he has an idea which throws a monkey-wrench into
the evidence the police have cooked against him. He realises his deal
is being held up simply to lower the price, so he forces the issue,
makes a deal he can life with, and guarantees his childrens' jobs.
It's win-win.
And then, the one base
he hasn't covered comes back to bite him in the neck. His wife (Susan
Sarandon) who cannot forget the way he brought his affair nearly into
the house, but who even more cannot forgive the way he treated their
daughter. It's a neat twist, because the very family values he was
trying to protect prove his downfall.
But the movie ends at a
charity gala, his wife's work, where his daughter introduces him as
her 'mentor, friend, and father'. He has lost everything, but
everyone is smiling. The charity is the Robert Miller Oncology
Center. It is as if he is a cancer himself.
Arbitrage (2012 US 2013
UK) written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki, is on DVD release
No comments :
Post a Comment