In Arbitrage, Richard Gere plays a
hugely wealthy banker in some serious trouble. He’s become embroiled in a
complicated financial deal that’s threatening to sink his company if the funds
don’t get moved around quickly enough to cover his assets. And that’s not even
the worst of it. He sneaks away from his wife (Susan Sarandon) to drive upstate
with his mistress (Laetitia Casta) and ends up flipping the car. When he comes
to, he sees that his mistress is dead in the passenger seat so he flees the
scene of the accident. (The pointed intent couldn’t be clearer: the rich flee
catastrophe on instinct.) So he’s dealing with financial trouble and legal
trouble, skulking around large boardrooms, spacious offices, and fancy
apartments, trying to avoid the consequences of his actions.
Writer-director Nicholas Jarecki has created a phony fantasy
of a character study that feels altogether too calculated a guesstimate of how
the one-percent lives. (Not that I have any experience with that income
bracket, but it can’t be as simple as it’s made to seem here.) To put such
material in a standard thriller (the kind with dramatic turns that make it play
like an episode of Law & Order from
the suspect’s point-of-view) only cheapens what was sparsely drawn to begin
with. It should be juicier and with more of a bite; it’s all strangely
toothless. That said, Gere gives a persuasive performance of a man crumbling
under the burden of keeping up appearances. I also appreciated the work of Nate
Parker, as a working-class man Gere debates scapegoating, and Tim Roth, as the
investigator who is frustrated that the legal system seems rigged in favor the
rich. Would that these performances were in a movie that would be able to
better show them off.
Director Lance Daly’s The
Good Doctor is a squirmy thriller about a lonely young doctor (Orlando
Bloom) who falls in love (no, obsession) with a pretty patient (Riley Keough).
He decides to tweak her medication in order to keep her in the hospital under
his care. The script by John Enborn follows this situation to its predictable
conclusion and the talented supporting cast (including Taraji P. Henson,
Michael Peña, and J.K. Simmons) fills out the plot convincingly enough. It’s a
shame, then, that the whole experience is just a sad, slow circle down the
drain, completely without tension and devoid of emotional interest. This is a thinly
imagined thriller that manages nothing more than a queasy feeling once or twice.
It’s most unfulfilling in its flat visual style and ploddingly obvious script. As
someone who sort of enjoyed Daly’s similarly slight first feature, the kids-in-puppy-love
romance Kisses, I’m especially
disappointed to see that this is where he’s gone next. He’s a director of potential
and maybe someday he’ll live up to it.
Stand-up comedian Mike Birbiglia has told the same – very
funny – story in several mediums now. If you’re anything like me, you may have
managed to hear several times over (in his stand-up, on This American Life, in his memoir) about his intense sleepwalking
problem that caused him to, say, dream about a jackal intruding in his bedroom,
which would result in him fast asleep shouting at a hamper, fully convinced he
was confronting a wild animal. This is obviously a problem, but his career
seemed to be taking off and his relationship with his girlfriend was growing
complicated and one thing leads to another and he’s in a deep sleep while
jumping out a second-story hotel window.
This story’s latest telling takes movie form in Sleepwalk
with Me and it’s perfectly fine, though I did wonder if it would have
worked better on me if the novelty was still there. Birbiglia, here the writer,
director and star, has a loose, casual style that pumps up dream sequences with
off-hand discombobulation that is undercut with silly shifts to reality. To
fill out the rest of the semi-autobiographical movie, it follows Birbiglia’s
relationship with his girlfriend (played by Lauren Ambrose) as well as his
growing stand-up career that takes him from hotel to hotel, crummy gig to
crummy gig. Altogether it plays like Woody Allen lite, warm and sweetly small. This
is a minor, but often charming movie, mostly because Birbiglia is so likable.
But the thing of it is, you’d have just as good a time listening to the
original monologue, so I have a hard time recommending this movie outright.
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