Arbitrage

More terrifying than King Kong, Jaws, or the apocalypse, the Corporation has become the cinema villain/monster par excellence. This is apropos in our current age of corporate executives turning money into more money in mere seconds, and wiping out the life savings of entire companies with fraudulent business practices. Arbitrage, like last year's superior Margin Call, examines a billionaire (Richard Gere) whose irresponsible, arrogant, greedy behavior threatens his company and all who work for it. But he's nothing if not a sly businessman, so when his hedge fund is threatened with exposure, he decides to sell his massive company in time to avoid public embarrassment or any financial ruin. Gere is perfectly suited to this role: he's got the look of a wearied executive down, spinning all kinds of falsities about working for his family, when it's really his own success, the addiction he has to making more money, that drives him.

When his hush-hush lover, a failed French artist, dies in a car accident in the middle of the night because Gere fell asleep at the wheel, he's finally faced with a genuinely sticky situation, and Arbitrage is about how he tires to get himself out from under it. It's not a brilliant movie, but there's something brilliantly corrupt that it shows us about human beings, about American culture, about our entire value system.

What's so refreshing about Arbitrage is that it doesn't go for the obvious, but the inevitable. The people in this world are the recipients of a moral decay that's far more glamorous than the things we see on the news--the horrific shootings and the drug trafficking and the human trafficking, that we all deplore with such moral certitude. The moral decay of Arbitrage is one where negotiations extend beyond the conference room and into the bedroom, where money drives every motivation, and even marriage runs on the concept of mutual interests. There's a decidedly Victorian sense of patriarchal faux-benevolence that keeps all the players in place. The finale is so wonderfully fitting that it makes up for the fact that at times Arbitrage feels like an episode of Law and Order mixed with Wall Street. It's not a great movie, but a pretty good one, and a frighteningly apt comment on human character.

The supporting cast includes Susan Sarandon (who doesn't get to shine the way I wanted her to, until near the end) as Gere's wife, Tim Roth as a detective, Brit Marling as Gere's daughter, an executive herself who still sees the business world as a place inhabited by honest people with clean motives, Nate Parker (who delivers the film's most sympathetic performance) as a down-on-his-luck kid (whose father once worked for Gere) who comes to Gere's rescue, Laetitia Casta as Gere's girl-on-the-side, Stuart Margolin, Chris Eigeman, Graydon Carter, and Bruce Altman. Written and directed by Nicholas Jarecki. 105 min. ★★★

Days of Heaven

--> I once loaned my copy of Days of Heaven (1978) to some friends, and when they returned it, one of them dubbed it, “the movie that wouldn’t end.” Indeed, a Terrence Malick hour-and-a-half feels much longer than a Francis Ford Coppola three-hours, because, for all its beautiful imagery, Days of Heaven is a bore. People who talk favorably about it never mention the plot, because Malick, the writer-director, doesn’t care very much about plot: instead, supporters of Malick’s work talk rapturously about its rich, Academy Award-winning cinematography (by Nestor Almendros). It’s a simple love triangle-story, set in Texas (but filmed in Alberta), in which an opportunistic drifter (Richard Gere) pairs off his girlfriend (Brooke Adams) with a shy sharecropper (Sam Shepard) who’s got less than a year to live. 

The story isn’t bad, but Malick wants the nature imagery to envelop it (and us). He enjoys de-emphasizing human stories in favor of natural imagery. (He's almost righteously anti-plot, which may explain why he uses such a tired one. We’ve already seen it before, and Malick prefers that we fill in all the gaps for ourselves, with bits of dialogue and parts of other movies we’ve seen. That way Malick can focus on art.) Like 2011’s The Tree of Life, Days of Heaven isn’t terrible, necessarily, and there are certain images that remain in your head, particularly the scene where locusts invade the wheat fields. But it all boils down to something pretentiously antithetical to the enjoyment of movies, as much as it tries for some kind of vapid “pure cinema” look and feel. The worst part is that so many people have been fooled into thinking it's great cinema. It's technically well-made, but it's difficult to respond to the characters when they feel so muted, so undernourished, as though their own creator had nothing but contempt--or worse, disinterest, which grows out of contempt--for them. Linda Manz plays Gere’s kid-sister, who narrates the film with her distractingly ugly New York accent. Malick wants her childish observations to sound philosophical, but they’re really just cant. 

Note: the picture that has long adorned the title page of this blog was from Days of Heaven. Now that I've reviewed the movie, I think I'm going to retire it. See if you can identify the next one.