What if a Gordon Gekko type figure was in the midst of the largest financial deal of his career and then goes and gets his mistress killed? This is the central concept of Nicholas Jarecki’s Arbitrage, which boasts an impressive performance from Richard Gere and its fair share of flaws.
Gere is Wall Street hedge fund tycoon Robert Miller and the picture opens with him celebrating his 60th birthday with his wife (Susan Sarandon) and family. He’s got a girl on the side too (Laetitia Casta) and it’s this relationship that comes into focus when he dozes off driving with her. They crash – he lives, she dies. Miller is forced to immediately decide whether the incident will jeopardize the impending sale of his company that’s worth hundreds of millions. He enlists Jimmy Grant (Nate Parker), a young man with a criminal past whose father served as Miller’s driver for many years to help. Jimmy picks him up from the scene of the accident before the police arrive and becomes an accomplice to the cover-up.
It is Jimmy who the police focus on, led by Detective Bryer (Tim Roth, overacting a bit) and this leads to Miller having to choose how the situation plays out. While his actions were accidental, some of Miller’s handlings of his company’s finances turn out to be downright illegal which strains his relationship with daughter (Brit Marling), who serves as CFO for the fund. We go back and forth as Miller tries to be one step ahead in his personal and financial problems. In essence, he looks at managing the accident cover-up just as he would managing an investment deal – carefully and often coldly.
Arbitrage opened in 2012 to mostly rave reviews, especially for Gere. He deserves a lot of that credit. Over the past few years, Gere has turned in one solid performance after another. The role of Miller is similar in some ways to the character he played in Unfaithful. Or at least those characters find themselves in similar storylines. Gere gives this part his all and it’s because of him that Arbitrage is often involving and interesting.
That being said, I was underwhelmed by the picture as a whole. The relationship between Miller and Jimmy is central to the story and yet it feels curiously underwritten. While Nate Parker shows promise in the role, the underdeveloped nature of his connection to Miller begs for more fleshing out. Sarandon is saddled with a fairly one-note role as the wife who may know more than her husband figures. And as mentioned before, Tim Roth hams it up a bit much as the detective determined to see the filthy rich boy fall.
We gets scenes that show Miller’s mastery of negotiation and it gives Gere a chance to shine – even if the scenes themselves feel familiar. For a movie about multi-million dollar investments, I had a hard time investing myself in the storyline.
**1/2 (out of four)
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