adminProf Joel White
Film: Arbitrage
Cinema: Eastgate
Cast: Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, tim roth, Brit Marling, Laetitia Casta, Nate Parker, Austin Lysy, Josh
Pais, Sophie Coates, Davy Faber.
Director: Nicholas Jarecki
Running time: 105 minutes
Type of film: corporate corruption
Age restriction: 16
LOOKING both forward to our time, and back to the age of the Egyptian dynasties, William Shakespeare in the 1600s had it right when he wrote: “What a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive.” And here we have a modern-day depiction of both the expression’s truth and its significance.
Filmed entirely in my home town New York from which I’ve been absent more than four decades, I can see that predictions of its descent into major levels of corruption and deceit can be lucidly captured by a film industry which has, in recent years, been given licence to “tell it like it is”.
Sparing nobody not the police, major industrialists, not the courts, not the lawyers who are prepared to tell blatant lies in open court if it will accomplish what vast sums are being expended for, both the dialogue and the action captured in this film go further and are truer than anything previously seen.
On its surface and with the revelation which may be easier to swallow than what comes later, the film teaches us that some of our major corporations upon which we depend daily for our mode of life are cheating and lying about their financial status and well being they are, in fact, exercising the old adage: “Robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
Because Robert Miller (Richard Gere, now fully the 60 years of age his character purports in the film) has the temerity to seemingly juggle fully lit sticks of dynamite while balancing on floating logs, no sympathy is engendered by his character’s predicament.
In my opinion, if ever a film character deserved what, unfortunately he doesn’t get, we see, in this film, that it is not true that “your crimes will ultimately seek you out”.
Cheating at every turn, as husband, father and business tycoon, he avails himself of his participation in the worst that was predicted by the doleful seers of the early and mid-20th allowed to have free rein.
For those who see the film you may be as surprised as I when it is revealed that his wife of all the years, played by 66-year-old, also New York-born Susan Sarandon, knew all along of his multiple duplicities but accommodated to them for the elegant life style they provided.
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