Tag: Susan Sarandon

Arbitrage

“What’s an Applebees?” Hedge fund CEO Robert Miller is so out of touch with the world and with himself that he can deliver a hilarious line like this and still be snidely condescending. He’s the anti-hero of “Arbitrage,” a character drama about a scummy guy with a lot of money and nothing to do with it.

Robert’s (Richard Gere) company Miller Capital is currently involved in a multi-million dollar fraud scheme as he tries to arrange a merger and avoid bankruptcy. It’s clear he has to get this merger, but the dialogue is strictly jargon, and at the end of the day, his need to get money and meet the bottom line seems self-serving.

But he’s also a fraud at home. Upon coming in late to his own birthday party, he grabs a stuffed animal and a package from a servant to hand to his grandkids as he walks in the door. When his family brings out the cake, he acts humble and surprised but has a speech in his back pocket.

And that’s not the worst of it. Robert is cheating on his wife Ellen (Susan Sarandon) with a young artist named Julie (Laetitia Casta). After missing her art show and upsetting her, he proposes the two of them drive off and vacation for a few days. But behind the wheel, Robert falls asleep and gets into a wreck that kills Julie. Fearing that he’ll be revealed for having an affair, he leaves the scene and peculiarly uses a payphone to call Jimmy (Nate Parker), a young black man from Harlem, to pick him up. The detective assigned to the accident (Tim Roth) then tries to pin obstruction of justice to Jimmy as a way of getting to Robert, and his resolve as a person is tested in his effort to stay clean.

The assumption would be that by the end of this mess, Robert will either be punished, learn the error of his ways or we as an audience will come away with more fodder for the class warfare argument. But writer/director Nicholas Jarecki has made a character drama first and a thriller second. “Arbitrage” is not a message movie. It observes how a man who for so long has been operating on earning more and more and staying that way can ultimately think no differently.

Gere is on fire in one scene where he talks about a copper mine that is such a sure thing that it is practically printing money. He comes across as so effortlessly indoctrinated by the idea that he can’t even begin to question the consequences. Gere is so cool and charming that he makes it hard for us to accept how heartless his character is. We want him to succeed, and we’re wrapped up in what will happen.

“Arbitrage” loses some points for not fully developing Robert’s wife as a tragic figure in this household, and it potentially has so much to say about these one percenters but holds its tongue beyond a few comments by Roth’s detective.

And yet there’s a beautiful shot where Robert steps into an elevator and lights flicker red like a devilish halo just above his head. “Arbitrage” distances itself from this besmirched man, but it’s riveting as if we’re drawn in at the sight of the Almighty Dollar.

3 stars

Cloud Atlas

“Cloud Atlas” opens with an old man muttering under his breath, talking about the juju o’ the bayou, or at least that’s what it sounds like. It’s a super close-up after looking down from the stars, so it feels a little profound, a little silly, a little captivating. Then you realize it’s Tom Hanks with really good makeup, and you realize very quickly this movie is bananas.

“Cloud Atlas” is a wild mess of a movie. It tells six stories over countless centuries, sharing actors and thematic structure, but only just barely narrative. So at times the whole thing is pegged to be philosophical and thought provoking, and then Jim Broadbent learns to drive an SUV and runs over Hugo Weaving wearing drag as they escape from a nursing home.

Whether or not it’s actually about anything is beside the point. It has the same transcendent, sci-fi possibilities and mumbo-jumbo that “The Matrix” did, which was also directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski (the siblings have paired up with “Run Lola Run” director Tom Tykwer), but at the end of the day it’s a fun journey through time with just as much visual imagination.

Describing how the plot functions is an effort in futility, but the movie itself actually does it best. “Each thing is understood moment to moment, but at any moment it could be headed in a different direction.” This may just be the movie accounting for its own jumbled narrative, but that is how “Cloud Atlas” feels. It flits in time, but none of it is particularly dreamlike or even surreal. Each of the six stories, if you broke them apart as they are, are presented linearly.

The only confusing part is the excessive crosscutting that the Wachowskis and Tykwer employ. They may jump from a barbarian attack scene in the dystopian future to the performance of a sonata in 1932 to a sex scene in the 22nd Century to a sight gag or punch line in modern day London. The brilliant thing is that they’re often edited as though they are one scene, completely different in terms of even the mood we’re supposed to feel, but fluid in their pacing and action. At one point when Halle Berry crashes her car off a bridge and plummets into the water, the movie leaves her hanging for nearly 20 minutes before we see her making her escape. To have it happen when it does, a theme of rescue seems to permeate throughout all the other story threads.

“Cloud Atlas” is all about its themes rather than concrete ideas. We start with each character sharing in an unlikely encounter. We see them experience feelings of escape, rescue and discovery, and before long they’ve all suffered loss and hardship, if not action. Voice over narrations, the image of a comet shaped birthmark and miniature Easter eggs connecting the stories suggest that our lives are not our own, that our spirits carry through generations, but because the stories never truly intersect, do they mean anything beyond wispy ideas?

I don’t think it matters much, because the movie’s lushness sweeps us up in its visuals and ideas. We see futuristic cityscapes, treacherous mountain ranges, majestic long shots on the high sea and colorful rooms that materialize with possibilities right before our eyes.

On a technical level alone, “Cloud Atlas” is a remarkable achievement. The running time is nearly three hours, but because the stories are so out of sequence we’re not checking our watch awaiting the next one to start. We’re mystified by the makeup that makes Tom Hanks, Hugo Weaving and Hugh Grant at times unrecognizable. We’re moved by the complex and exuberant performances of Jim Broadbent and Doona Bae, a South Korean actress who fully owns a rare lead part for Asians in a big budget movie.

Something that was more art house would also be more metaphorical in its ideas and imagery. The Wachowskis and Tykwer however put all their brainstorming right into the mouths of their characters. So moment to moment we get a line that resonates on an intellectual level, another that comes from a crazed Mad Hatter and seems laughable and another that is intentionally laughable. These ideas would be a slog if it jammed them down our throats, but perhaps like the way the filmmakers think the world operates, these possibilities are released like spirits floating in the movie’s universe.

I imagine I’ll see “Cloud Atlas” again very shortly, not because it’s a dense movie that needs to be unraveled, but because it’s a magical movie that makes it fun to be insightful.

3 ½ stars

Jeff, Who Lives at Home

Sometimes movies try so hard to be realistic they forget that they’re still movies.

The heartwarming comedy “Jeff, Who Lives at Home” has a mystic fascination with the idea that some signs that point to our destiny are almost too powerful to not be scripted.

Jeff (Jason Segel), the 30-year-old, couch-ridden stoner living with his mom (Susan Sarandon), believes in such a fate, and he thinks it’s more than coincidence he bumped into his brother Pat (Ed Helms) to help him investigate if his wife Linda (Judy Greer) is having an affair.

The film has a subtly self-aware plot structure. These characters belong in a small-scale indie movie, but they keep getting put into madcap situations worthy of something greater. Continue reading “Jeff, Who Lives at Home”