Plot-Driven Thrillers Always Keep Your Attention

When I finished this movie, I for some reason thought of 2011's The Ghost Writer and 2007's Michael Clayton.

Unlike The Ghost Writer, but very much like Clayton, Arbitrage's plot is very busy. It could have profited, and how(!), from a longer running-time; and maybe that's the extent of what's wrong with it. The characters for me remained people spouting words; there just wasn't enough exposition of Robert Miller's predicament from the beginning, exposition that would have made the viewer really root for him. The film is more than 1/3 through before the viewer understands the nature of his troubles--in the park bench scene with his daughter. Brit Marling played the most convincing character in the film and was very good, and in that scene, Gere came to life. His business problems were heroic and compelling.

The problem, as with The Ghost Writer, is that exposition takes up so much screen-time that character development never occurs. Unlike Gere's corrupt sex addict killer cop in Internal Affairs, I never had any feeling about who Robert Miller really was. Ewan McGregor's "ghost" might have been intentionally written that way, but this business exec shouldn't have been. The scene where he walks away from the exploding car is right out of Michael Clayton--and *that's* where this film's emotional poverty becomes clearest, or at least became clearest to me. Michael Clayton has got to be the best business-noir of the last twenty-five years, and by the time *he* walks away from an exploding car, we know him, really know him, care deeply about his survival, and feel that he's not at all morally ambiguous but as courageous and principled as a man could be, and becoming exponentially more so. With Gere, we just see a guy escaping a traffic fatality.

The sad thing is that Arbitrage is very good on the level of plot. It's actually perfect and reminiscent of the great legal thrillers of the 90's (Presumed Innocent, Jagged Edge).