Myles Aronowitz/Lionsgate
Laetitia Casta and Richard Gere in "Arbitrage."
“Arbitrage,” a sleek entertainment about how very good greed can be, is a fairy tale masquerading as a tragedy. It pivots on Robert Miller (Richard Gere), a shifty hedge-fund manager and 21st-century robber baron who’s foxed his way to the top of New York’s moneyed classes. Charmed and charming, with a quicksilver stride and the self-possession of a man accustomed to hearing the word yes, Robert lives in a rarefied world of private jets, live-in help and seven-figure checks made out to favorite charities. Masterworks adorn his Gramercy Park mansion where a multistory crystal chandelier cascades in the foyer like a waterfall of diamonds.
It’s an enviable life, at least from the outside where most of us will be, pressing our noses against the screen to watch the beautiful and not yet damned. It’s a world that the writer and director Nicholas Jarecki knows intimately (his father is the philanthropist Henry Jarecki) and captures efficiently. With pictorial precision he opens the film with Robert being interviewed — and smiling through words like bubble, reality and bust — and then soaring in a plane, where, perched above the clouds, he looks like the 1 percent god he is. Then it’s off to his mansion where, bathed in golden light, he blows out the candles on his 60th birthday and doles out kisses to his wife, Ellen (Susan Sarandon), and daughter, Brooke (Brit Marling).
The story starts to come into focus when Brooke, after playfully flashing a copy of Forbes at Robert (he’s the cover boy), asks why he’s selling the company. That’s important information, as is his leaving the party to join his lover, Julie (Laetitia Casta), a character Mr. Jarecki unwisely tries to turn into an emblem of Robert’s duplicity. Yet even more instructive is how Robert waves away the magazine when Brooke shows it to him, as if embarrassed by its display or superior to it. His little wave, like the cut of his suits and luxurious hair, make the point that he isn’t Donald Trump. Robert inhabits wealth; he doesn’t flaunt it. His is a kingly provenance, and that gesture is a sign of his power.
It’s also precisely the kind of detail that Mr. Jarecki uses to enrich the film with a persuasive verisimilitude. Everything looks seductively right in “Arbitrage,” from the parade of artworks (Brice Marden, Fernando Botero, Marilyn Minter) to the soft lighting that softens every facial crease. The insistently moving cameras that tag alongside Robert convey his supreme ease of movement — nothing and no one is off limits to him — while also intimating an underlying tension. (The excellent director of photography is Yorick Le Saux, a longtime collaborator of the French filmmaker Olivier Assayas.) Mr. Gere is one of cinema’s great walkers, graced with a suggestively predatory physical suppleness, and he slips through the movie like a panther. He’s the film’s most deluxe item.
Mr. Gere is predictably fun to watch, but his beauty and long-cultivated sympathetic screen presence make it harder for Mr. Jarecki to create the complexity that he’s after. (Movie stars pull you in, no matter how ostensibly vile their characters.) The busy plot doesn’t help. Robert has cooked the books and is trying to sell his company before he’s exposed. His dirty dealing should be a richly exploitable topical subject, but instead of digging into the psychology and morality of greed, Mr. Jarecki only glances and lectures in that direction before piling on a lot of melodramatic complications, including a death, an investigation and a cynical detective (Tim Roth). These days, it seems, the illegal manipulation of hundreds of millions of dollars simply isn’t enough to incite moral outrage.
“Arbitrage” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Dirty words, money and deeds.
Arbitrage
Opens on Friday nationwide.
Written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki; director of photography, Yorick Le Saux; edited by Douglas Crise; music by Cliff Martinez; production design by Beth Mickle; costumes by Joseph G. Aulisi; produced by Laura Bickford, Kevin Turen, Justin Nappi and Robert Salerno; released by Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
WITH: Richard Gere (Robert Miller), Susan Sarandon (Ellen Miller), Tim Roth (Detective Michael Bryer), Brit Marling (Brooke Miller), Laetitia Casta (Julie Cote), Nate Parker (Jimmy Grant) and Graydon Carter (James Mayfield).
Source: http://movies.nytimes.com/2012/09/14/movies/richard-gere-in-arbitrage.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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