Integrity, Anyone? … Anyone? … ?
Review by Ken Burke
Just
because you’re filthy rich, you need to make a shady business deal, and you’re
hiding your involvement in a car-crash crime doesn’t make you a bad person,
does it?
Robert Miller (Richard Gere), the
principal (but not principled) character in Nicholas Jarecki’s Arbitrage (a financial term for making a
profit while simultaneously buying and selling something) says that “The
competition for the limited amount out there can make a person manic.” Obviously Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan haven’t
concerned themselves with the manic aspect of their love for Ayn Rand über-capitalism
because they’re focused on the 53% of Americans who don’t feel “entitled”
to food and health care, the ones who just go out and take it from the rest of
us. Miller doesn’t see that he’s taking
anything improperly from anyone, he’s just running a highly successful business
in Manhattan, the economic capitol of the world, where he’d like to rake in a
bit more capital by selling his company to another fat cat. The only problem is that he’s secretly
diverted millions of company money to a “sure thing” copper mine in Russia
which has become bogged down in complications, including getting the cash back
out of the country, leaving Miller with a $412 million hole in his cooked
books. Now things are getting tense in
his penthouse world because the colleague who surreptitiously bankrolled him enough
to keep his audit temporarily clean wants his loan back, the deal is being
stalled by the potential buyer trying to get the purchase price down while a
more thorough audit is looming close enough to sour the deal, Miller’s CFO—his
daughter, Brooke (Brit Marling)—is stumbling onto suspicious ledger entries
with meager explanations from Dad, and, just to make things even more
interesting, Miller tries to escape his problems for a night with his pouty
French mistress, Julie Cote (Laetitia Casta), but while driving her car into
rural upstate NY he dozes, flips the car, she dies, the car goes up in flames,
he runs, and the noose begins to tighten as he tries to simultaneously untangle
himself from all of this misery while keeping some sense of family unity with
an increasingly distraught daughter and an angry wife who finds no solace in
his sense of values, economic over ethical in all directions.
In Arbitrage the most ethical of the characters is Brooke, as she
feels compelled to learn what’s really going on in the counting house, but even
she has her weaknesses as she keeps trying to convince herself that her dad
just couldn’t be as crooked as he seems to be, even though that becomes
increasingly more difficult with the flimsy bookkeeping excuses, the odd
behavior as Miller keeps trying to evade questioning from determined NYC Det.
Michael Bryer (Tim Roth, in a more fierce version of Peter Falk’s determined
L.A. sleuth, Columbo), and the faux attempts to appear surprised and remorseful
at Julie’s funeral (to the outer world he was simply bankrolling her art
gallery). Brooke has to know in her own
heart that the ledger isn’t the only thing not adding up, especially when her
precious dad reminds her that she’s still just an employee to him: “Everybody works for me!” And when she tries to re-frame his
questionable tactics back into a family mode so that she can feel more
protective of him he rebuffs that as well by acting as the isolated “patriarch”
who must protect his family from his public and private sins without ever
including them in any explanations, seemingly for their safety but with that
intended preservation of stability in their 1% lifestyle constantly threatened
by actions that could easily leave them broke and disgraced, even if just by
association with all of his failures.
When he manages to pull off his needed miracles by the end of the movie
to preserve his wealth and reputation she’s still there at his public
testimonial, smiling and seemingly still enthralled with his success and
mentorship, but given the fake smiles he’s displaying as he basks in undeserved
glory it’s hard to know how genuine her admiration remains.
Even if Brooke still believes in her
father’s façade, Robert’s wife Ellen (Susan Sarandon) certainly doesn’t because
she’s seen or sensed enough evidence to know the charade he’s been playing,
even as his lawyer-enhanced detective work robs the cops of the main evidence
they have against him (via the pressure put on his car-crash-night helper, Jimmy Grant [Nate Parker]) and his own bravado finally pushes reluctant buyer James
Mayfield (Graydon Carter) to sign off on the company purchase before any
further audits reveal the stinking nature of the deal. He may be off the hook with the law
enforcement and business communities but he’s not yet able to withstand Ellen’s
demands for a well-financed separation as punishment for the risk he caused to
their family. Despite his seeming
refusal to accept her confrontational terms, even with the treat to blow his
alibi on the night of Julie’s death, the ending gala with Ellen beaming support
for Robert along with Brooke implies that she’s as big a shark as he is, even
to the point of insisting on a fat share of his dirty money to keep her living
in luxury after Robert is forced to move on to other ventures (and likely
refinance himself with his offshore accounts, as noted by Ellen). No one else is very clean here either, as
Mayfield learns that his purchase is tainted but says nothing because of the
prestige he gains by buying Miller’s company (helping prop him up at a delicate
time), Det. Bryer is caught at his dirty game involving fabricated
evidence against Jimmy in order to pressure Miller to confess, and Jimmy
finally succumbs to the $2 million payoff offered by Miller to just go away and
forget this all ever happened. Many
decades ago Joni Mitchell wrote and sang “The Arrangement” (on her 1970 album Ladies of the Canyon) in which she says
of an unspecified man, “You could have been more, Than a name on the door, On
the thirty-third floor in the air, More than a credit card, Swimming pool in
the backyard.” Robert Miller could certainly
have been more than what his billionaire’s wealth was really worth in the vault
of human decency, but given the resources he’s able to muster he pulls out a
victory in this satisfyingly-structured (if not admirably-conceived) movie that
just vindicates the old wisdom of the rich get richer ("The fundamental things apply, As time goes by") because no one else can
stop them as they simply move their resources around from holder to holder,
confirming themselves in control of our society (which continues to laud Miller
in his “exoneration”) and driving the rest of us to imitate them as our only
means of growth in this rigged game of contemporary life. (I'd understand if you'd think that my comments are merely a diatribe from
an unrepentant leftie; however, here's a similar attitude from Mike Lofgren in The American Conservative from August
27, 2012, as noted at http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revolt-of-the-rich/ where
he says: “Our plutocracy now lives like
the British in colonial India: in the place but not of it. … A
century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew
Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie’s is presently lacking among our
seceding plutocracy. … the super-rich have achieved escape velocity from the
gravitational pull of the very society they rule over. They have seceded from
America.” Mitt and Paul, care to comment? Or aren't you regular readers here anymore?)
When my “real work” load got much
heavier this fall (as "real" as you can imagine) I decided to limit myself to only 1 review a week instead of
the multiple ones that I’d been doing before, but each week the universe
confounds me with the situation of seeing another film that relates enough to
my actual review that I could/should still be doing a duo commentary. That situation continues with another tale of
an ethically-challenged protagonist in Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal‘s The Words, which has generated some
harsh words from my critical (not the more neutral “criticism,” in this case)
colleagues who have generally trashed it as being ambitious in intention but
flat in execution (Rotten Tomatoes average 18%, Metacritic 37%, Movie
Intelligence 42%). I wouldn’t be that
hard on it if I were doing an actual review (although these lengthy comments are about
as close to “actual” as you can get), probably rating it at 3 of 5 stars
because it’s an interesting premise with an underused narrative twist and some
very decent acting throughout, including by Bradley Cooper and especially
Jeremy Irons as The Old Man. Here the
ethical dilemma confronts Cooper’s struggling novelist, Rory Jansen, whose work
is rejected by publishers either as mundane or, in one case, fascinatingly
insightful but too esoteric for the public to accept without the author already
being an established “name” (which is a horrible indictment of the public’s
perception of art in our culture, not unlike how baseball umpires often are
more generous in their strike zones with accomplished pitchers or hitters but
“squeeze” rookies because they haven’t yet “earned” the benefit of a borderline
judgment call). Faced with seemingly
losing all chance for his dreamed-of career, Rory stumbles onto a manuscript in
a junk store briefcase, quickly realizing that the story contained therein and
its literary style is that great marketable combination of smooth prose and
emotional impact, a perfect introduction to the public for a yet-undiscovered
literary talent. Rory sells his soul to
the devil of once-in-a-lifetime-opportunities, becoming a smash hit before he’s
hit with the shock of being exposed by the unnamed old guy who really wrote the
book decades before, lamenting his lost love in post-WW II Paris. In an interesting structure, The Old Man
refers to himself in the third person when describing the tragic events of his
life which he transformed into the book stolen by Rory, but this also parallels
another author reading his work to an audience, both within this film and
externally to us as observers of these writers-turned-public-narrators.
Where the presentational twist comes
here is in the framing story where Dennis Quaid plays Clayton Hammond, author
of The Words, the novel that comes
alive on screen for us about Rory and The Old Man, along with Old’s life as a
younger man (played with proper pathos by Ben Barnes) dealing with the lost
passion of his wife, Celia (Nora Arnezeder), after the death of their baby; Clay
reads passages from his book for most of his screen time (ironically displaying
mundane prose, not nearly of the caliber of his book-within-a-book, The Window Tears, that is so lauded
within the framing novel, The Words)
but then becomes the focus at the end as he’s pursued by an ambitious Columbia
U. grad student who hasn’t even read his book before she starts seducing him
but then rejects his ending where Rory just accepts his unearned success after
The Old Man dies. “Life or fiction,
which do you choose?” is the key question of the finale, with Clay choosing
life (by accepting the offered passion from Daniella [Olivia Wilde] rather than
the maintained memory of the wife who has left him) whereas his character Rory
accepts the fiction of his unjustified author status (which will now open the
door for his own books, which he knows aren’t as good as the stolen one,
whatever other qualities they may have).
All in all, The Words doesn’t
fully live up to its own possibilities but the passion that Irons pours into
his defeated-by-life character makes up for a lot of other shortcomings (more
information is available at http://www.thewordsmovie.com/ if you’re interested).
And, to cap
this all off, these other stories of scoundrels who take what they don’t
deserve yet end up fat and happy reminds me of another version of these
morality tales but one that outshines both of this week’s subjects, Woody
Allen’s magnificent 1989 Crimes and
Misdemeanors, one of those rare films to which I’d assign 5 stars
(!)—among many other critics, Roger Ebert was impressed as well if you’d like
to read his review at http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/articleAID=/20050911/REVIEWS08/509110301/1023. In this one we have the crime of murder for
no other reason than the inconvenience of a mistress (Anjelica Huston) harassing
her well-heeled ophthalmologist lover (Martin Landau) for commitment to her
rather than his wife, resulting in her demise in the serious aspects of a film
that also blends in comic elements about Allen as a struggling documentary
filmmaker with so much of a burdened sense of the need for social justice that
he’s barely capable of actually accomplishing anything, including keeping the
attention of his would-be love (Mia Farrow) who ends up with Allen’s nemesis,
an egotistical but very successful TV producer (Alan Alda), proving—along with
other personal tragedies in the story—that good deeds and justice seem sadly irrelevant
in a world where you can not only get away with murder but also convince
yourself that there’s nothing to feel guilt or shame about as long as you can
find comfort in the material rewards that come with your crime (in this case
the absence of a messy, expensive divorce and the social turmoil of being
public with a lower-class-than-you paramour).
Everything that Arbitrage and The Words set out to do with their
probes into situational morality and the disturbingly heady sense of triumph
that enlivens the socially privileged who walk away clean from their
transgressions is done in a more haunting, melancholy manner in Crimes and Misdemeanors, with the added
pleasure of some Woody Allen comedy from his most consistently successful
years. Any of these cinematic morality
tales are useful in forcing us to ask what we’d do in similar circumstances and
how well we could live with what we’ve done, but of the 3 I’d easily go with
Allen on DVD over either of the current theatrical contenders, especially with
the ending words from the philosopher
character Professor Levy: “We are all faced throughout our lives with
agonizing decisions. Moral choices. … We define ourselves by the choices we
have made. We are in fact the sum total of our choices.” Yet even this inspirational wisdom is put
into perspective of the reality that Levy commits suicide, possibly a more
profound choice than any made by the other characters I’ve referenced
above. But as self-assured killer Judah
Rosenthal (Landau) notes, “If you want a happy ending, you should go see a
Hollywood movie”; instead, I’d advise Crimes
and Misdemeanors, the most thoughtful experience of this bunch of warnings
about ethical collapse in our culture.
But getting
back to the main subject of this review, if you’d like to scrutinize Arbitrage’s portfolio more carefully
here are some suggested links:
We encourage you to look over our home page (ABOUT THE BLOG), found as
the first one in our December 2011 postings, to get more information on what
we’re doing and why we’re doing it.
You’ll also see our general Spoiler Alert warning that reminds you we’ll
be discussing whatever plot details are needed for our comments so please be
aware of this when reading any of our reviews and be aware of our formatting
forewarning about inconsistencies among web browser software which we do our
best to correct but may still cause some visual problems beyond our control.
Please note that to Post a Comment you need to either have a Google
account (which you can easily get at https://accounts.google.com/NewAccount if you need to
sign up) or other sign-in identification from the pull-down menu below before
you preview or post.
No comments:
Post a Comment