Arbitrage

I had a platonic date with THE Drew Seeley but I made us late for our first movie choice so we decided to see Arbitrage instead.

Richard Gere & Susan Sarandon play Robert & Ellen Miller with such ease you immediately get caught up in their upper crust Manhattan world of gala checks and ignored extra-martal affairs.  Until Robert's makes him the focus of an investigation by Detective Michael Bryer (Tim Roth) that proves vaguely irritating for his character before crossing into potentially life-altering places.  Bryer persists in his quest for the truth behind a car accident that resulted in a fatality.  He believes Robert is involved but he cannot prove his theory.

Most people try to keep business and pleasure separate but in Robert's selfish pursuit of his version of a perfect life, he realizes these two worlds are not only intertwined but dependent on one another.  While trying to facilitate the sale of his curiously audit-clearing hedge fund, we find out he has had to take a few "short cuts" to make it to the top.  If nothing else, he is a man defiant in the face of certain failure and incapable of remorse or empathy, but some how he manages to charm you past these short comings, and you soon understand how he's made it to the top in such an unsavory business.  I'm not sure if the character is perfectly developed or if this is simply Mr. Gere in yet another effortless turn at humanizing an outrageous character's id.  My guess is the later.

That's about as much praise that I can heap on this movie.  It's not a bad movie but it's also not great.  The plot never really goes anywhere terribly exciting but you want it to.  And you expect it to.

I was lucky enough to read an earlier draft of writer/director Nicholas Jarecki's previous script The Informers.  He wrote the HELL out of the script.  When it was produced they ended up chopping some 40 pages to keep the budget from inflating even more than it already had and it showed in an incomprehensible story lines that never connects to any other part of the story.  It was a shame what ended up getting lobbed onto the big screen instead of what he had intended.  So maybe this vision of his got hacked also-but I doubt it because he also directed Arbitrage.

Perhaps I missed "the point" which was that the story is more about who you turn to for help when you get stuck in the stickiest of situations--rather than a fictional expose of the dark world of New York City finance.  If that's the case, they chose the wrong part of this story to focus on.  The interesting part is diving into the mind of a Wall Street megalomaniac and watching it all unravel.  Now that, I want to see.