Last week I saw Arbitrage, a slick corporate suspense thriller about love, loyalty, power, greed and how one decision can change it all, or …? With a stellar cast of Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and Tim Roth, you might think that the two key ingredients are … (a) a multitalented award winning lead actor, Richard Gere and (b) an equally phenomenal supporting cast. But no these alone don’t guarantee I’ll be hounding friends to see it. Actually it’s much, much simpler than that.
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The evening began with about six trailers … actually it might have been four, I lost the will to live after the first three.
The trailers presented a series of action packed movies, each upping the ante in terms of the gun action and car crashes. By the end of it even the sight of Brad Pitt in one of the trailers didn’t saved it. I was in adrenalin overload.
Then Arbitrage began and it was clear I’d have to reengage my brain …and quickly.
New York hedge-fund billionaire magnate Robert Miller (Richard Gere) has it all, a beautiful mansion, loyal wife Ellen (Susan Sarandon), and a brilliant daughter and heir-apparent Brooke (Brit Marling). Approaching his 60th birthday life looks very, very good.
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Dig deeper and we find the books have a $400 million dollar hole in them … yep $400 … million. Through some extreme creative accounting we find Robert desperately trying to sell off his trading empire to a major bank, before the depths of his fraud are revealed. But this isn’t the only deception he’s keeping from the world, and his family. He’s also balancing an affair with French art-dealer Julie Cote (Laetitia Casta).
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Just as he’s about to unload his troubled empire, an unexpected bloody error sees him embroiled in another level of deception. Desperately juggling family, business, and crime he turns to a face from his past Jimmy Grant (Nate Parker).
One wrong turn ignites the suspicions of NYPD Detective Michael Bryer (Tim Roth), who once aroused will stop at nothing in his pursuits. Running on borrowed time, Miller is forced to confront the limits of even his own moral duplicity. Will he make it out before the bubble bursts or will he, as Ellen suggests, become ‘the richest man in the cemetery?’
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Sure Richard Gere is easy to watch, and brilliant at leaving us teetering between both wanting Robert to be caught, and to get away with it.
Yes Susan Sarandon’s understated role of Ellen is critical, and Tim Roth always plays a good rottweiler.
But later, pondering why I wanted others to see it, I realised that it’s simply really, you know a movie is good when …
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Half way into the movie your bladder sends a signal that it’s full, way full, actually way past full, and yet you refuse to budge. There’s no lull in the drama where you can safely nip out without missing a vital piece of information.
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When the movie ends, people stay seated in the cinema discussing what they’d seen, and then we go for coffee we spend the next hour debating the ending.
I really hope you go see it soon so I can have someone else to talk to. If you do please come back and make a comment about what you thought.
In cinemas September 27th
Showing at ACE Subiaco, Event Innaloo, Hoyts Carousel and Garden City, Cinema Paradiso and Windsor Cinema. Madman Entertainment Rated MA 15+
