Arbitrage

I’m always glad to see films about people over 40 and equally glad these days to see films about how the US financial system works. Arbitrage isn’t a great film but it’s an interesting one with a very welcome return by Richard Gere to the kind of role he was born to play, after almost a decade of week roles in bad films like The Hoax, Chicago and Amelia. His Wall Street hedge fund bigwig is one of the villains of the 2008 financial collapse, but the film presents him as a cool and even sympathetic guy, despite the choices he makes at almost every step of the story. This is the kind of thing that Gere is perfect at; he enables us to connect emotionally with slimy guys even better than Michael Douglass.

The genre of the film is essentially an old-school moral-thriller, but it’s not all that thrilling. It works far better as a character study. We spend nearly all our time with Gere and get to understand what makes him tick, how he got to be the powerful and successful man he is and what the costs to him were and will be.

First time writer/director Nicholas Jarecki’s classical Hollywood take on the financial disaster isn’t as effective as J.C. Chandor’s ensemble-indi Margin Call from last year, but it is a welcome addition to an all too small group of films about this subject; a subject that cinema should be ideally suited to exploring in greater detail then Oliver Stones two simple-minded Wall Street movies.