Arbitrage (2012)

Nicholas Jarecki's Arbitrage opens on Richard Gere's Robert Miller, a hedge fund magnate with the polished, hollowed-out calm of a man who has never once been told no by anyone who mattered. He is selling his empire, cooking the books to hide a four-hundred-million-dollar hole, and conducting an affair with a younger gallery owner whose phone calls he ignores at exactly the wrong moment. When a car crash kills her and leaves him bleeding in the dark, he does what men of his class have always done: he calls someone poorer, in this case Jimmy Grant, the son of his late chauffeur, and lets loyalty do the rest. The film tracks the cover-up with the patience of a man filing paperwork. It never raises its voice. That restraint is its chief virtue and, for our purposes, its chief limitation.

The class critique here is real and sustained. Miller's fraud, his lender's impatience, the buyer who reviews a damning second audit and decides the optics of scrutiny are worse than the crime, all of it forms a tidy indictment of wealth protecting itself. Susan Sarandon's Ellen and Brit Marling's Brooke eventually seize leverage and reshape the ending, which earns the film some credit on that front. Nate Parker's Jimmy, exploited to shield a white financier from consequence, carries a racial subtext the screenplay declines to name. The ensemble is diverse in a manner that feels like casting rather than commentary. There is no romantic subplot for anyone but the protagonist, and no lecture. The film prefers to let corruption simply walk to a podium and smile.

What we have, then, is a well-made thriller about a bad man escaping justice, made in 2012, before such stories required a closing statement. It observes rot instead of explaining it. That keeps the sermonizing to a minimum and the moral accounting squarely in the viewer's lap. A sommelier might call this a restrained vintage. It pairs well with cynicism and goes down without a single speech about the system.