Movie review: Arbitrage
Richard Gere stars as successful hedge fund guru Robert Miller, devoted husband of Ellen (Susan Sarandon) and doting father of his company’s investment manager, Brooke (Brit Marling). The suave businessman has a number of secrets to hide, not least his affair with young French artist Julie (Laetitia Casta), although the money-obsessed Robert is far more exercised by the fact that his company is going broke just as it is about to secure a lucrative merger. Once he has established all of his characters, writer-director Nicholas Jarecki then catapults Miller into a nightmarish scenario courtesy of a fatal car accident, and the story turns into a pacy thriller with a moral conundrum. Gere turns in an impressively nuanced performance as Miller, a man who appears to be emotionally disconnected from his actions and their consequences. The very human pressures brought to bear on Miller by Julie, Ellen, Brooke and eventually Detective Bryer (Tim Roth) take their toll on his self-created myth of indomitable perseverance. It’s difficult to empathise with Miller, and yet Gere’s performance is such that it’s also very hard not to sympathise with his plight. Roth, Marling and Sarandon provide strong support, and Jarecki’s script takes a number of pleasingly unexpected twists and turns as it drives on towards its poignant climax.
There’s something quaintly old-fashioned about Broken City (15A), a contemporary PI story starring Mark Wahlberg as disgraced cop Billy Taggart. Drummed out of the NYPD for cold-bloodedly shooting dead a suspected killer-rapist seven years previously, Taggart now operates as a private investigator. Taggart may have seen it all, but even he’s surprised when Mayor Hostetler (Russell Crowe), in the throes of a re-election campaign, commissions him to spy on his wife, Cathleen (Catherine Zeta-Jones), whom Hostetler suspects of having an affair. Taggart quickly finds himself sucked into the world of dirty politics, where double- and treble-crosses are the order of the day. Crowe is at times hilariously over the top, but Wahlberg neatly underplays his cynical, mouthy PI, while Jeffrey Wright, Barry Pepper and Kyle Chandler all contribute important minor roles — but the story appears to proceed in a surprisingly sluggish and predictable fashion. The fault lies less with Allen Hughes’ direction, and more with Brian Tucker’s script, which appears to be more interested in ticking the boxes of the classic noir tale than it does in bringing anything fresh to the conventions of the genre. It’s a solid PI thriller, but the set-up and the stellar cast deserved a little more invention.
