BEFORE: Second shift working at the movie theater last night, so I was out until 1 am - then it took me about an hour to get home, the subway was stopped after a certain point and I had to take a shuttle bus the rest of the way - and if you're very used to the subway stops, it can be hard at night to realize when the bus is close to your stop, because you may not be familiar with the look of that part of the city when you're above ground. So I usually keep the map app open on my phone, and then I can tell from my location on the map when the bus is closest to my house, and then I can recognize my stop. Thanks, technology.
This film came into my life a few months after my last chain with Richard Gere, so there was no way to include it with "Norman" and "Movie 43" - umm, I think. So I'll count this instead as a Susan Sarandon movie, as she carries over from "The Calling".
THE PLOT: A troubled hedge-fund magnate desperate to complete the sale of his trading empire makes an error that forces him to turn to an unlikely person for help.
AFTER: This film is kind of in line with "The Burnt Orange Heresy", in that it's about a rich guy who corrupt, thinks the world is his oyster and should revolve around him, and then does some very bad things and tries desperately to cover them up and come out on top. It's a riches-to-almost-rags story in both cases, only then in both cases the rich guy succeeds and puts one over on everybody, essentially gets away with murder, and are we, the audience, then supposed to champion that? It's a bit wonky, in both films, regarding who we're supposed to root for, and why.
There are two things going on concurrently here, first this hedge-fund manager, Robert Miller, has been playing a bit fast and loose with accounting practices, he's borrowed several million dollars from somebody and placed that on his company books to cover up a shortfall, and he's done this to make his company more attractive before an impending merger, and then I suppose after the merger he has to pay that other guy back, with interest, but doesn't that just dig his own hole that much deeper? Also, won't the company that his company is merging with realize, very quickly, that his company doesn't have as much capital or assets as he claimed? Again, wonky. I'm no expert on big business or important financial corporate transactions, but fraud is fraud, if he's got some money that he's claiming is his, and it just isn't, that's going to come up, sooner or later.
His daughter, who's got some kind of Ivanka-like role in the company, notices the discrepancies, and does her own investigating into the matter, but he keeps brushing her off. This film was released in 2012, but it's definitely got a Trump-ish sort of feel to it, what with the main character falsifying his assets, increasing his own net worth when that's to his benefit, and probably decreasing the value of the company around tax time, or when it benefits him to do that as well. (That's pre-President Trump-ish, back when we all knew him as a corrupt businessman, before he was a corrupt politician...)
And also like Trump, Miller's got a wife who does a lot of charity work, and she pretends not to notice that he's got a girlfriend on the side and probably has a lot of other affairs with random women, too. In Miller's case he's got a side-piece who runs an art gallery, or is an artist or something, and he (through his holding company, of course) paid for her apartment, and every time he goes out late at night, telling his wife he's going to work, he's probably headed straight to that apartment. You can't say it doesn't happen in real life, because it probably does - there are probably some people who are so rich they can do whatever they want, personally and professionally. I guess you just have to hope that someday they'll get what's coming to them.
In Miller's case, things go south when he decides to get away from all the financial dealings and troubles and take the girlfriend upstate after her gallery show, only he's tired and he's had a bit too much to drink, maybe, and, well, they never make it there. To get out of the situation, he calls the son of an old trusted employee to come pick him up, then when he gets back to the city, he climbs in bed with his wife, telling her he'd just gone out to get some ice cream (rich people don't already have ice cream in their freezer?) and she therefore becomes his alibi. A jaded detective then devotes himself to proving that Miller left the scene of a crime, and he also goes after the guy who picked Miller up that night, who claims that he got a wrong number late at night, then decided to get out of bed and go for a drive upstate, for no particular reason. Right.
The rest of the film concerns Miller and his people juggling both the financial merger and the criminal case against his driver, and sure, resolutions are reached in both cases - but are they the right ones? Should this rich man be able to manipulate the system, in both situations, to come out on top? And if he can, should we champion that? It's all twisty and complicated, which is good, but it also feels wrong somehow, like you need a shower afterwards. Maybe that's the whole point, I don't know. It's a little sad to see marriage portrayed as just another complicated legal and financial transaction, but maybe for a certain class of person, that does ring true.
Also starring Richard Gere (last seen in "Isn't It Romantic"), Tim Roth (last seen in "Selma"), Brit Marling (last seen in "Destroyer"), Laetitia Casta, Nate Parker (last seen in "Ain't Them Bodies Saints), Stuart Margolin (last seen in "The Hoax"), Chris Eigeman (last seen in "Kicking and Screaming"), Graydon Carter (last seen in "She's Funny That Way"), Bruce Altman (last seen in "Morning Glory"), Larry Pine (last seen in "Addicted to Love"), Curtiss Cook (last seen in "The Interpreter"), Reg E. Cathey (last seen in "Hands of Stone"), Felix Solis (last seen in "Tallulah"), Tibor Feldman (last seen in "The Devil Wears Prada"), Austin Lysy (last seen in "The Company Men"), Josh Pais (last seen in "Motherless Brooklyn"), Monica Raymund, Gabrielle Lazure, Shawn Elliott (last seen in "Thirteen Conversations About One Thing"), Sophie Lane Curtis (last seen in "The Art of Getting By"), Paul Fitzgerald, Sam Kitchin, Zack Robidas, with a cameo from Maria Bartiromo
RATING: 5 out of 10 grand jury members
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