A Golden Globe nominated Richard Gere plays a high-flying Wall Street magnate juggling crises financial, emotional, and ominously legal in screenwriter Nicholas Jarecki’s feature debut.
Robert Miller (Gere) is the CEO and founder of investment firm Miller Capital. He’s about to sell his company to the fabulously wealthy James Mayfield (Graydon Carter), but needs the deal to happen urgently before the $400 million hole in his accounts, hidden by his pliable auditor, is discovered. His personal life, juggling his wife Ellen (Susan Sarandon) and his mistress Julie (Laetitia Casta), is stressful enough. But between trying to stave off his wife’s suspicions, visit his mistress’s new art exhibition to avoid her hysteria, and finagle the forensic accountants, Miller finds himself asleep at the wheel, literally. He enlists the help of an old lieutenant’s son, Jimmy (Nate Parker), to cover up his deadly accident, but it seems certain either his daughter/business partner Brooke (Britt Marling) or embittered NYPD homicide detective Bryer (Tim Roth) will unravel Miller’s lies.
Richard Gere is a puzzling actor. He’s occasionally self-satisfied but can generate audience sympathy out of thin air in films like Red Corner and The Jackal, but, as the necessity of doing so in films like those indicates, he just can’t seem to recognise good scripts. Gere does have some barnstorming rants here, and he’s brilliant at saying abrasive things and then instantly apologising; as if the stress Miller is under causes his social filters to malfunction. But Gere alone cannot carry a film dripping cliché. His mistress Julie is the most irritating, high-maintenance, art gallery owning French stereotype imaginable. It is simply impossible to care about her, when you want to slap Miller for carrying on with her given how great his privileged life is. And this is the script’s fault as Casta excelled as Bardot in 2010’s Gainsbourg.
The slowly tightening legal vice around Jimmy as he tries to stonewall his way out of admitting any involvement with Miller’s situation is compelling, but not nearly as tense as that in Side Effects. Jarecki also nicely heightens the suspense of Miller trying to meet the elusive Mr Mayfield to settle the buyout of his firm in person like men. But this film doesn’t really shed a light on high finance like Margin Call (or even Wall Street 2’s central speech) did. There’s nothing wrong with melodrama, Dickens and Ibsen are melodramatic; what’s unforgivable is turgid melodrama. And, when Sarandon finally comes into her own near the end, her grandstanding reveals that, for all Marling’s gameness in showing how Brooke’s suspicions of her father’s honesty cause her to unravel, this is melodrama about a tycoon masquerading as biting social commentary.
Jarecki was dropped from directing his 2008 adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ The Informers. This proves his competence directing, but his script offers many individual gems without overall impact.
2.5/5
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