Movie Review: "Arbitrage"

"Arbitrage": A-.  Abraham Lincoln is credited with making the observation that you can't fool all of the people all of the time. Richard Gere plays investment firm founder and CEO Robert Miller, who apparently never studied Honest Abe in a history class. Miller has lots of secrets that are eating away at him, but he has boxed himself into a corner and the only way to get out of the box is a strategy of playing it cool, and of course telling lie upon lie to keep each secret a secret. He has a mistress, Julie (French actress Laetitia Costa), whom he's hiding from his wife (Susan Sarandon). He has ordered the head of his accounting department to falsify a multi-million dollar transaction, and must keep that secret from the Chief Financial Officer, Brooke (Brit Marling), who happens to be Miller's daughter, and from the tycoon who is negotiating to buy one of Miller's businesses. He is being pressed for the repayment of $400 million which an impatient business acquaintance has loaned him "off the record," but he can't come up with the money until the sale to the tycoon is closed. Julie is pressing him to ditch his wife, as he has been promising to do for years. On the outside Miller is Mister Cool, but the inner turmoil is raging.

All of those problems pale in comparison to what happens when he becomes a prime suspect in the death of one of the aforementioned characters. The events surrounding the death bring two more interesting characters into play. Jimmy (Nate Parker) is a young ex-con whose father was Miller's personal chauffeur for many years. When the father died, Miller made sure the dead man's family, including Jimmy, was provided for. Thus, Jimmy owes Miller big time, and feels obligated to help when Miller needs Jimmy's assistance in leaving the death scene. How could Jimmy say no, even though if the cops find out he'll most likely return to prison? Speaking of cops, Tim Roth plays Detective Bryer, who fingers Miller for the crime but bides his time building a case against him.

There is not much to like about Robert Miller, but director Nicholas Jarecki unveils the story in a way that gets the audience involuntarily pulling for Miller anyway. Gere is credible in the role, dashing and debonaire like a Wall Street honcho should be, but with a simultaneous sleaziness that must be part of his core to be up to his chin in this kind of marital, financial and legal trouble. I loved Tim Roth as the detective. He asks all the right questions of all the right people, knowing when to press and when to back off. Has Miller met his match in Detective Bryer?

This was a fast-paced 100 minutes, with no extraneous scenes and a plot that fairly well holds up to logic. Almost everything Miller says and does is what you'd expect from a man with his problems and character flaws. The same is true for his wife, his daughter, Jimmy, and the other people with whom Miller interacts. For example, the dialogue between father and daughter after she finds out the books have been cooked is extremely well written and performed. Likewise for the dialogue between Detective Bryer and Jimmy, who is torn between maintaining loyalty to Miller and the prospect of returning to prison as an accomplice after-the-fact. Bryer dangles the likelihood of a ten year prison term over Jimmy's head.

Arbitrage, in financial terms, occurs when an investor buys a commodity in one market (say, the US) and immediately sells it in another market (say, China), keeping the difference in the values of the related currencies as his profit. In Arbitrage, there is no actual arbitrage occurring, but the term is nevertheless a good metaphor for Miller's methods. He is, in a sense, buying time and hoping to cash it in for a better life in the future. But as he buys his time he runs into more problems, all of them through his own doing. If only he'd realized that the life he could have led without the lies, the fraud and the deception would have still been pretty sweet.