Arbitrage

Arbitrage – A wealthy investment banker falls asleep behind the wheel and crashes his girlfiiend’s car. She is killed and the investment banker flees the scene. He calls a young black man whose family he once helped and asks him for a ride back to Manhattan. The police suspect the banker but can’t pin the crime on him. Nicholas Jarecki’s film uses the metaphor of a car crash to symbolize the collapse in markets in late 2008, equating a hit and run accident with crime in the world of high-finance. As it happens, the banker has embezzled vast amounts of money from his investors, is leveraged by debt owed to business associates, and, during the course of his frantic, if self-assured, cover-up of the homicide, must also manage a series of deceitful and criminal transactions necessary to extricate himself from financial embarrassment. On its own terms, the film is successful and looks glamorous – Richard Gere plays the evil financier and Susan Sarandon acts the part of his long-suffering wife. There are vivid and well-written supporting roles for the black kid (Nate Parker) implicated in the scheme, the crusading cop (Tim Roth), and Gere’s lawyer played by Stewart Margolin – Margolin is a wonderful actor; I remember him vividly in the role of “Angel” performing with James Garner on the TV show, The Rockford Files and, for me, he justifies watching this movie. Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, has a small role that he seems to enjoy. In general, the movie has the aura, at times, of a pet project made by wealthy folks living in Tribeca – the hero doesn’t know what an Applebees is. The film is a variant on two other, and better pictures, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Three Monkeys (2008), which has the same premise but carries it to its logical and bitter conclusion, and Woody Allen’s great 1989 film Crimes and Misdemeanors. These are pictures about the impunity of wealth and power. Arbitrage looks great – sleek Lear jets cruise through the skies and sinister businessmen schmooze in upscale restaurants; the women are all stunners and the rooms are full of museum quality art. (The closing titles lists the art objects featured in the film – major paintings by Brice Marden, Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, etc.) The bad guys conceal their wickedness by making donations to charities and everyone is uniformly corrupt or has a price for which they can be corrupted: Gere tries to purchase his innocence, the cops dishonestly try to frame a guilty man, and everyone else can be bought or sold. The currency of the realm is bribery and corruption and no one is exempt from using that coin to pay for their vices. The film is compelling, well wrought, and completely minor. The central plot device – the wealthy banker calling a poor black kid from Harlem for assistance-- is wholly implausible and obviously a contrivance. When the CEO of a big company gets in trouble, he calls his second-in-command and implicates him in his wrongdoing – he doesn’t seek aid from the equivalent of his secretary or janitor.