Arbitrage is a 2012 drama film directed by Nicholas Jarecki and starring Richard Gere. Filming began in April
2011 in New York City
The movie has an interesting plot. A troubled hedge
fund magnate is forced to turn to an unlikely person for help after a crucial
mistake involving a sale in his trading empire.
The film has Richard
Gere as Robert Miller, Susan Sarandon as Ellen Miller, Brit Marling
as Brooke Miller, Nate Parker as Jimmy Grant, Laetitia Casta
as Julie Cote, Tim Roth as Det. Michael
Bryer, Monica Raymund as Reina, Josh Pais as Aimes and Larry Pine as Jeffrey Greenburg.
Susan Sarandon and Richard Gere play a couple whose pampered life is rocked by
financial scandal.
In Arbitrage, a tasty financial
thriller written and directed by Nicholas
Jarecki (it's his dramatic-film debut), Gere is Robert Miller, an
investment titan who is standing at the precipice (though almost no one knows
it). Gere has never been more
likable or alive on screen. His friendly dry charm works for the film in
fascinating ways. He lies and sleeps around, he commits major financial fraud,
he slinks away from a car accident that was all his fault — and the film makes
no apologies for any of this behavior. Yet we're torn between wanting to see
him pay for his transgressions and get away with them.
That is the way a true thriller works: It creates
moral urgency by making the audience complicit in what it knows is wrong. The
early scenes of Arbitrage have some of the stomach-churning, high-finance
vertigo. Miller, a billionaire hedge-fund
magnate, is trying to sell off his company but is covering up a $412 million
hole in the firm's portfolio. To cook the books, he has borrowed the funds from
a fellow tycoon, who now wants his chunk of fortune back. Can Miller stretch out his money-mirage
scheme long enough to close the deal?
Miller got other tawdrier
problems: a high-maintenance mistress who throws fits if he's 15 minutes late,
and then...that car accident, which he tries to cover up. Jarecki's sharply structured, tautly written drama keeps
overlapping Miller's dilemmas.
Tim Roth is tensely funny as the
film's Columbo/Javert figure, a detective who keeps showing up, and Susan Sarandon (as Miller's wife), Nate Parker
(as the Harlem kid with a mysterious link to him), and even Graydon Carter (in a flourish of a
cameo) make the most of well-etched roles.
Nobody can resist this movie that stars Richard Gere in almost every frame,
expressing himself in the cool tones of a billionaire and also in the harshly
melodramatic screams of a man in deep trouble. Gere is the ideal actor for the role of a man who despite combining
the greed of a Bernie Madoff or the
compulsion to cover up an accident like Ted
Kenney at Chappaquiddick has so much charm that we’re going to root for him
to get away with whatever he did. Nor does it hurt his character that the
detectives seem so eager to make charges that will stick even if they threaten
a young black man with fifteen years’ incarceration if he refuses to snitch on
the man he helped.
In his first feature-length narrative film, Nicholas Jarecki lets us in on what
it’s like to be a billionaire; exposing the truth that the higher you go, the
more crashing the fall, as the Greek tragedians knew so well.
Susan Sarandon and Richard Gere, as per everyone’s expectations, turn in professional
performance, Sarandon as the rich
but oft-ignored wife and Gere as the
charmer in heaps of trouble. Yet the most illuminating work comes from Tim Roth as the detective, a man who
hates rich people, and who questions everyone while slouching so far down on
the chair that he looks ready to catch some shut-eye – but whose interrogations
are designed to grind down the defenses of the accused.
Thus Arbitrage is an interesting film
that will get released on 14 September 2012. Do watch it.
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