The word “arbitrage,” as I understand it, means taking advantage
of the time lag with which information is transmitted between
markets in order to buy in one market and sell at a favorable price
in another to those who don’t yet know what you know. It has
nothing to do with the new movie of that name by Nicholas Jarecki.
His hero Robert Miller (Richard Gere) is not engaged in arbitrage
but in out-and-out fraud, falsely representing by means of
accounting chicanery the company he is trying to sell as solvent
when it is not. The fact that — spoiler alert! — he gets away
with this and that the person he sells the company to, James
Mayfield (Graydon Carter), chooses to do nothing to bring him to
justice suggests that Mr. Jarecki, who wrote the screenplay as well
as directing, (a) has some very peculiar ideas about the way
business works and (b) himself can see no important difference
between legal and illegal transactions.
To him, it appears, they’re equally unpalatable. That rich
people routinely swindle each other as well as the general public
is simply a given, which I suppose makes it easy for him to believe
that everything they do is more or less crooked. Yet he also rather
admires Mr. Gere’s character for the success with which he pulls
off a bigger swindle than his competitors are able to do. And this
isn’t even the main plot of the movie! It is, rather, the framework
within which a technical sub-plot is able to dominate our
attention. For Robert Miller is not only a crook and a fraudster,
he is also a love-rat and a hypocrite. In time-honored fashion, he
is presented to us as an ideal family man, surrounded by wife
(Susan Sarandon) and adoring child (Brit Marling) for about five
minutes before we see him driving off with his French mistress
(Laetitia Casta) in a Mercedes which he promptly crashes, killing
her.
As he is in the midst of trying to pull off the previously
mentioned fraud at Mr. Mayfield’s expense, he calculates that he
can’t afford the bad publicity (among other things) that would
attend his reporting the accident, so he naturally decides to cover
it up. This he is able to accomplish, to the extent he does
accomplish it, with the help of the only sympathetic character in
the movie, Jimmy Grant (Nate Parker), who is a black youth of some
twenty summers whose late father was such a loyal employee that
Miller agreed, before he died, to “look after” young Jimmy. Now he
has to call in some presumed favors in order to get Jimmy’s
assistance in fooling the cops. Unfortunately, one cop in
particular, Detective Michael Bryer (Tim Roth), is hot on his trail
and threatening to throw the book at Jimmy (who is on probation) if
he doesn’t give up his friend.
Gosh! What do you think will happen? Do I need to tell you that
the detective proves to be just as corrupt, albeit with different
motives, as everybody else in Arbitrage — apart, of
course, from Jimmy, who is the only convicted criminal? But just as
Robert in Sydney Carton mode is about to give himself up in order
to save his protégé from being sent back to prison — see? he’s not
such a bad guy after all — he realizes that the cop’s dishonesty
may give him a way to elude the grasp of the law for a second time.
How can we not wish for his success in doing so when even the guy
he swindles insists on giving him a pass? True, he’s still got to
pay the price for his marital infidelity, but we may have good
hopes that he will have to pay no other.
The best line in the picture comes as Robert Miller is
questioned by his lawyer (Stuart Margolin) about Jimmy and why he
would “put your family’s future in this kid’s hands.”
“He’s not like us,” Miller explains.
“Is that a good thing?” asks the lawyer.
Indeed it is! The only thing in this movie that remotely
resembles a moral principle is Jimmy’s steadfast adherence to the
thieves’ code of honor: that you don’t snitch to the cops on your
pals and benefactors. Jimmy learned that on the streets where the
likes of Robert Miller consigned him, which gave him at least that
much of a moral advantage over his social betters — men (and women
too) who, we may safely assume, have no principles at all except
where they may be convenient. In fact, Miller’s moral awakening to
self-sacrifice in determining to give it all up for Jimmy, even
though he is not forced to go through with actually doing so, is
seen as the saving grace which allows us to root for his success in
defeating justice. In a world where everyone is a crook, the crook
with any glimmer of conscience shines with the luster of a good
deed in a naughty world. But is that a world which exists anywhere
outside of the movies? I’m guessing not.
