Oct. 24, 2012 - Issue #888: Winter Guide 2012

Arbitrage

An unbalanced mix of character study and thriller

Is it a mark of shrewdly measured ambiguity or just confused storytelling that Arbitrage can't seem to decide if Robert Miller (Richard Gere), a charismatic billionaire, Fortune cover-boy, beloved patriarch, hedge fund manager and the film's protagonist, is a) a well-tailored snake so solipsistic that he doesn't even seem cognizant of his moral bankruptcy or perilous irresponsibility—the kind of guy who helped to bring about the 2008 financial crisis and ruin countless lives—or b) a Job-like figure, manicured for pathos, whose 60th birthday is accompanied by a blizzard of catastrophe that only someone as adept with negotiation, deceit and multitasking could possibly circumvent? I'm willing to give writer/director Nicholas Jarecki—clearly a smart guy (and the little brother of fellow smart-guy filmmakers Andrew and Eugene Jarecki)—the benefit of the doubt, to call all this ambiguity and to call this ambiguity a strength, a way for us to feel complicit in Miller's activities, so emblematic of the values underlying the so-called American capitalist spirit. But there are aspects of Arbitrage—the woefully flat female supporting characters, the scenes that needlessly stray from Miller and diffuse the film's momentum—that diminish this effect, rendering the film too artificial to hit the desired nerves.


Miller's problems include the possible exposure of big-ticket financial fraud that could thwart the desperately needed sale of his company and land his own daughter (Brit Marling), a partner in the company but unaware of dad's having cooked the books, in jail. More urgently—at least for audience members more versed in the perils of illicit sex than corrupt financial practices—Miller's mistress (Laetitia Casta), a young artist whose career and very comfortable lifestyle he's supporting, is killed late one night in an accident resulting from Miller falling asleep at the wheel. Imagining the chaos that news of his involvement in the accident will unleash upon both his professional and personal life—he assumes his wife (Susan Sarandon, in a role undeserving of her talents) doesn't know about the affair—Miller decides not to dial 911 and instead flees the scene and calls on the son (Nate Parker) of a former chauffer whom he figures owes him a favour. Soon a scruffy, innately suspicious detective (Tim Roth) starts sniffing around, trying to force the chauffer's son to squeal on Miller, and soon we're fully immersed into the terrain of the slickly anonymous Hollywood thriller, replete with a boilerplate dial-tone genre score from Cliff Martinez and a baffling dependency on establishing shots. It's as though Jarecki, like Miller, feels like everything will work out all right if he simply dots every i and crosses every t. Instead, the film feels overworked and overlong.

There are ways of fusing the elements of a character study with those of a thriller; I think Arbitrage might have benefitted from injecting more of the former into the latter. Gere's quite appropriately cast, perfectly convincing as a guy who works very, very hard at being a phony. Gere does fine with what he's given, but I wanted Jarecki to be a little more curious about him, to fully commit to letting the audience be the judge of Miller's actions and surrender to a truly subjective, first-person approach. vueweekly.com comments: powered by Disqus