Nick Jarecki's "Arbitrage'

Ar'bit-rage: "The simultaneous purchase and sale of an asset in order to profit from a difference in the price." Modern capitalism in a nutshell.

Richard Gere: American actor (b. 1949), the perfect performer to play a skunk.

First-time director Nick Jarecki's Arbitrage is an impressive debut that adds further to Hollywood's gallery of rogue financiers, which includes Michael Douglas in Wall Street, Christian Bale in American Psycho (an investment banker who doubles as a serial killer), Jeremy Irons as the survivalist CEO in Margin Call, and Robert Pattinson in Cosmopolis as a panther encased in a limousine.

There is no archetype as enduring as the villain, be it the witch in a Grimm's fairy tale, a black hat in a Western, the mobster in his various incarnations from Scarface to The Godfather, and, of course, hardiest staple of all, the vampire.

And now— sign of the times— we have the trader. He may be the scariest figure of all.

Juggling the books

Gere's Robert Miller, of Miller Capital, is a hedge fund manager who has it all: the Manhattan townhouse, the tall, beautiful wife (Susan Sarandon), the tall, beautiful daughter (Brit Marling), and the demanding French mistress (but would you have a French mistress any other way?). He's a Master of the Universe, but not the master, for a Russian coal mine deal gone sour has forced him to juggle his books and take out an expensive, off-book loan from a big client. The only way he can cover his debt is to sell his firm to a large investment bank, which is dawdling over the deal.

This is trouble enough, but when Miller is involved in a fatal auto crash, his potential legal problems take on an entirely different dimension. A Colombo-like bloodhound, Detective Michael Bryer (Tim Roth), gets on his scent, and tracks down the driver of his getaway car, Jimmy (Nate Parker).

Jimmy is the African-American son of Miller's late chauffeur, and he owes Miller a thing or two. He is also, as Bryer sneeringly reminds him, "expendable"— and, with a bit of doctored evidence, Bryer cuts through the kid's alibi. Confronted with a long prison term, Jimmy's loyalty wavers, and the lawyer Miller has hired for him advises him not to take the fall.

My daughter, my employee

If Miller has one problem with his surrogate son, he has another with his actual daughter, Brooke, a brainy young thing whom he employs as his investment counselor. Smelling trouble, Brooke demands the books and sees they've been cooked.

Miller has an auditor in his pocket, but Brooke realizes that jail time could await her as well. In one of the film's two scenes that crack the emotional façade that surrounds everyone, she berates her dad for putting her in harm's way.

"I'm your daughter!" Brooke cries at Miller.

"No, you're not!" he storms back. "You're my employee!" Gordon Gekko couldn't have put it better.

Price of an alibi

When the villain is also the hero, do we want him to thrive or fail? A little of neither.

Gere's Miller is a juggler with one ball too many in the air. He needs luck, nerve and smarts. He also needs to sniff out the weak points in the opposition, be it the lust for a quick conviction or an extra zero on the bottom line. In Miller's world, the last buck is always the prize.

The one opponent he hasn't sized up, though, is his long-suffering wife, who tolerates his philandering but not the pain he has inflicted on their daughter. Her price to provide an alibi for him will be control of his fortune. Gere and Sarandon have this out in an epic scene in which both marital partners come as close to facing the truth of their lives as they probably can.

Like the recent bittersweet Israeli comedy Footnote— also a film about ambition, power, and betrayal, albeit in a very different world— Arbitrage ends with its protagonist smiling onstage, about to make a speech that will seal a perfect lie. In a deeply corrupt age, that's as close as life comes to a happy ending.

Smirking through life

As an actor, Richard Gere has always had the air of a man a little too smart for his own good, who carries off life with a smirk. This tendency can lead him to superficiality, and he needs to dig deeper to find vulnerability in his roles. His Robert Miller is a man who lives on his very conviction that he is smarter and tougher than anyone else.

When he comes up against his limits, Gere sports the baffled look of a man in a blind alley who's certain that there must be an escape hatch somewhere. Gere can be very good at such moments, and he is here, in one of his best performances in years.

The underutilized Susan Sarandon is quite his match, and the rest of the cast— especially Stuart Margolin, as the lawyer with an ethically challenged client— does well. Only Tim Roth's derivative, over-the-top detective seems out of place.

Nick Jarecki keeps the pace going, and although he doesn't yet show a distinctive profile as a director, he may, like J. C. Chandor of Margin Call, be a talent worth watching.

There's a reason, of course, why our Masters of the Universe think they can get away with everything. Many of them already have.♦


To read a response, click here.