Arbitrage (Nicholas Jarecki, 2012)

To pinpoint the moment Arbitrage ceases to be plausible is to assume it ever established any kind of suspension of disbelief at all. And when Richard Gere fails from the start to make his billionaire hedge fund manager, Robert Miller, look remotely in his element with business talk, the commentary Nicholas Jarecki wishes to tie to his evil money-handler does not work. Hell, Gere's utter ineptness is but one of several early giveaways of the lack of care paid to the film. Unconvincing as a hedge fund guru, Gere is equally out of place with his family, with whom he has an unironically loving relationship yet looks like a total stranger around them. Perhaps that can be explained by his affair with an Italian artist, who enjoys the financial support of her lover yet lives in a flat that looks like an IKEA showroom.

Like the privileged child of a 1990s movie, the mistress throws a fit when Miller gets caught in a meeting and misses her important exhibition. After she gesticulates for a bit, the two head out and Miller passes out briefly at the wheel, leading to an absurdly oversized single-vehicle accident that leaves the woman dead and Miller terrified. Or maybe just extremely annoyed. Hard to say. Jarecki uses this involuntary manslaughter as a fatuous analogy. The man covers up his company's books to keep up appearances as the great hedge fund scheme implodes with exponentially increasing speed, and now he has to cover up his physical crime. This is an obvious, and common, method of tying more abstract, technically legal financial chicanery to that which people universally consider a violation of the law, and ostensibly it should make Miller seem doubly a villain.

I'm Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007)

Upon its release, I'm Not There struck me as a hollow experiment, a nifty "what-if" but nothing more. Not helping matters, certainly, was my own lack of familiarity with Bob Dylan, a sacred cow whose enigmatic profile (as evidenced by this fragmentary "biopic") split into so many personalities that I never knew how to approach him. For all its dazzling formal techniques, I'm Not There frustrated me for doing nothing, it seemed, to explore Dylan's real personality. Its much-ballyhooed division of Dylan's various artistic reinventions into separate roles for different actors was its greatest weakness.

Of course, Bob Dylan's refusal to be defined as any one thing but Bob Dylan (and sometimes not even that), is what has made him endure as much as a mystery as a legend. Haynes does not attempt to "solve" Dylan, and if I'm Not There ultimately concludes that there may be no real Dylan under all those smokescreens, it nevertheless paints a compelling portrait—well, collage—of a man who exists wholly within pop culture. The trait that links the six characters representing Dylan's personae is a hint of persecution by those who love him, of devotion and mistrust displayed in equal measure. Even the earliest incarnation of Dylan, a mere child faces hardship, even if he has to invent some of it.

Days of Heaven

Having watched David Gordon Green's George Washington before this, I need not speculate over the long-reaching influence of Terrence Malick's pastoral 1978 drama about a love triangle in the pre-World War I Heartland. George Washington borrows heavily from this lauded masterpiece, from its narrative twists to its beautiful and evocative direction. Though some might call this emotionally muted, I found Days of Heaven to be a haunting portrait of people who have learned to live with pain, no matter how great.

In 1916, Bill (Richard Gere) gets into a fight at a steel mill with a co-worker and accidentally kills him. On the lam, he collects his young sister Linda (Linda Manz) and his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and the three travel to Texas. In order to dispel any gossiping, Bill and Abby pose as siblings and the three of them hire on as workers for a rich farmer (Sam Shepard). One day Bill overhears that his boss is dying, and hatches a plan: Abby, whom the farmer loves, will marry him and collect the money from his will after he passes.

All of this sets up one meaty love triangle, but Malick presents it in a bizarre way. Instead of delving right into the middle of the intrigue, he pulls back and places the events of the story in the memoirs of Linda. Her rambling narration reads less like exposition and more like a commentary track, more reflection than clarification.

Filling the gaps between Linda's teasing and mysterious voice-over is the gorgeous cinematography from Néstor Almendros. Pause the film at just about any point and you'd have a painting worth hanging on your wall. Almendros, who was actually losing his sight during the shoot, managed to capture every scene perfectly using mostly natural lighting.

The lives of the three come undone in the final moments. Bill gets found out, and it all goes to hell in a hand basket. It gets so bad that we hear a glimmer, though nothing more, of pain in Linda's narration. She's a child who grew up knowing only hardship, and she knows how to bury it. You get the feeling that, among the two adults, she was the only one who knew how it could all end. But that doesn't prevent that tiny speck of torture escaping, and it's little details like this that make Days of Heaven more than merely a pretty picture.

When you get down to it, what is the point of the film? It purposefully breaks up its love triangle to pull focus from an interesting but contrived direction. Really it's a portrait of people learning how to deal with misfortunes. Though we cannot say for certain because we meet her in adolescence, we sense that Linda never had a childhood. This is her story, not Bill's, and it's more heartbreaking than Bill's machinations could ever be.