The opening sequence says everything about a film. It is the equivalent of entering a party, alone, with all eyes on you. Whilst names, relationships and intentions may not immediately be explained, everything from your cufflinks to your shoelaces express who you are, the mood of the room, and the starring roles and disposable beings circulating within it. In many films, predictions can be made in the first thirty seconds that prove true in the last. Just like a party, you can tell who’ll still be around when the sun comes up and the credits roll.

With this in mind, from the outset it is clear that Arbitrage is entirely, wholeheartedly about Robert Miller (Richard Gere) who, in turn, is all about money. We enter mid way through an interview where Miller, who is cold and hard like the cash in his pockets, is discussing the fact that we humans are in constant competition for a finite number of dollars, and it is this competition that makes us, to use his word, ‘manic’.

This frantic mania hinted at in the opening dialogue is clearly an indication for what’s to come, and as intriguing a prospect as this hinted-hysteria may be, as the camera zooms in on his smug face, Gere-haters in their drones would be inclined to take this moment to switch off their television.

Except, actually, don’t.

The film (made in 2012), as expected, follows the business and personal exploits of the Machiavellian Wall Street billionaire Robert Miller, whose life we enter in to moments before it’s complete combustion. Juggling his financial cheating in work with his romantic cheating on his wife, (played expertly, of course, by Susan Sarandon), he is managing well enough, until a huge tragedy and a wily detective, (played, of course, by Tim Roth) threatens to pull the Persian rug out from under his Prada-clad feet.

I’m not going to lie, Arbitrage isn’t a great film by any means. Nicholas Jarecki’s direction is pretty enough, but the plot, whilst attempting to be everything at once, is spread too thinly, and no single interesting avenue is explored to its full potential. Relationships, whilst initially misunderstood enough to be curious, are never adequately explained or delved in to, and audiences are in danger of missing out on an excellent ending due to the dry, clinical middle. This lack of depth is only emphasized by the sterilized nature of the characters, which, thankfully, are expertly played, and when tragedy does occur, the film leaps from some seedy Wall Street affair to something else entirely, and as we witness it with Gere, and as such there is a burst of frosty relief in and amongst the misery.

It is in fact the casting that elevates this film from okay to arguably great. Award-winning Gere is regal and luxurious in his perfectly tailored suits, Roth swaggers as the somewhat-typical downtown detective, and Sarandon is consistently excellent until her waspish, vapid character is required to really announce herself, at which point she becomes subtly, elegantly masterful.

Whilst the film develops in a largely obvious manner, the end handful of scenes are reason enough to sit through the first hour-and-then-some. Without giving anything away, despite the initial sequence showing the film to be entirely about Robert Miller and his exploits, an admittance of knowledge makes you want to re-watch the entire thing, with that character’s awareness in mind.

Needless to say, Miller, as powerful characters do, implodes at the exact moment he is required not to. In the final moments of the film, after nearly two hours of exploits and smarm, he is required to make a very public, very important speech. As such, we finish where we began, with all eyes on him, with the audience speculating intently what he will say. Will he reveal all in his final speech? Will there be a hand-on-heart moment of admission or a revealing heckle from the destroyed wife and daughter? Or will he say nothing at all? Will the camera cut because we, like those he’s wronged, have by this point heard it all.

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