Arbitrage

Arbitrage

We are inclined to identify with the main character of a movie, even if he is a heartless bastard. Few films demonstrate this phenomenon more sharply than Nicholas Jarecki’s “Arbitrage,” and few actors could have made it work as well as Richard Gere. Here is man involved in a multimillion-dollar fraud, who cheats on his wife, tries to cover up the death of his mistress and would throw his own daughter under a bus. Yet we are on tenterhooks watching him try to get away with it.

Gere has always been an actor good at suggesting secrets below the surface. Improbably handsome, he has aged here into the embodiment of a Wall Street lion, worth billions, charming, generous, honored and a fraud right down to his bones. He plays Robert Miller, whose face must have beamed reassuringly from the covers of many magazines.

As the story opens, he’s merging his venture capital empire and has hidden $400 million in debt not only from investors but also from his daughter Brooke (Brit Marling), who is the CFO of his firm. Young and smart, she doesn’t suspect her father has cooked the books; if the deception were revealed she’d be hung out to dry shades of Bernie Madoff’s associates and family members. Both Madoff and Miller (who in many ways seems inspired by him) commanded trust, affection and respect from many who should have looked closer.

Robert Miller has another problem: A high maintenance mistress named Julie Cote (Laetitia Casta), who has opened an art gallery. Miller is the kind of man who requires a prestigious lover even if she must remain secret; his wife Ellen (Susan Sarandon) knows he plays around and accepts that as one of the rules of the game. Classy and well-maintained, she’s the kind of “corporate wife” who must have understood that a corporation is a person.

Julie knows how to push Miller’s buttons. Very late one night, he is driving her somewhere as a favor when he dozes off, the car crashes and she is killed. He thinks to make a cell call (to 911 or his lawyer? we can wonder), thinks better of it, walks away from the crash in some pain and uses a pay phone to call Jimmy Grant (Nate Parker), the son of a former chauffeur for whom Miller did personal favors.

Grant comes to the rescue, making him a witness after the fact. Miller has internal pain but ignores it; somehow holds himself together; projects his usual sleek confidence; continues his juggling act with the business deal. But Michael Bryer (Tim Roth), a scruffy police detective, investigates the accident scene and realizes that something doesn’t feel right so much so that, to Miller’s surprise, he turns up to question him. Roth projects indifferent chatty curiosity that conceals menace.

We may have seen elements of this scenario before, but the young writer-director Nicholas Jarecki making his first feature proves himself a skilled craftsman with a core of moral indignation. He knows how to make an engrossing thriller; it’s so well-constructed I felt urgently involved. “Arbitrage” is an example of solid construction and good writing in service of believable characters. It tells a story rather than relying on third-act action. It is in classic tradition.

Hitchcock titled his most common subject as “The Innocent Man Wrongly Accused.” Here, Jarecki gives us a Guilty Man Accurately Accused and that is what makes the film so brilliantly engaging.

We can’t not identify with the protagonist. It’s in our moviegoing DNA. But we cringe as Miller is willing to betray anyone Jimmy Grant, his daughter, his wife to win at any cost. This movie, especially its ending, literally could not have been made under the old Production Code.

It’s a radical rethinking of old values. It’s an assault on new American thinking that puts wealth above morals. Some of us might see Robert Miller as one of those financial executives who peddle junk investments to people who trust them and then bet against their clients’ own money. That was one of the Wall Street crimes that caused the 2008 collapse. No charges were ever filed against those specific thieves. They’re still on the job.

“Arbitrage” is not just a great thriller, but a persuasive argument about how the very rich get away with murder.

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