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.

But for a film that wallows so glibly in defeatist cynicism, Arbitrage's framing of this crime reflects its attitude toward Miller's financial transgressions. Gere's grating interaction with other people should peg him as a mean-spirited shark obsessed solely with himself, yet the actor looks like he simply read the technical jargon off the page without understanding a lick of the complicated legal shuffling required to pull off the tactics that lead to the economic crisis. And though he places his family, especially his daughter (who serves as his company's CIO), below his greed, he routinely claims, believably, that he wanted to provide for them. That has motivated many a villain, but the film inadvertently makes him sympathetic, as much a victim of his own design as the perpetrator. That he kills someone accidentally only compounds the sense that we should feel for this man.

Maybe he just seems sympathetic because those who seek to uncover his sins make even Gere's detached, clumsy performance riveting by comparison. Brooke (Brit Marling) notices the discrepancies in her father's books and proceeds to chase down answers like an old pulp journalist, not someone who would silently wish to make sure everything was alright within the company for which she is an executive. Her indignation when she learns the truth is laughable: Marling, barely 30, plays a character who enjoys a senior executive position at her father's multibillion dollar firm, yet she cannot fathom her dad's self-serving behavior? But for pure, stilted laziness, one cannot top Tim Roth as the detective on the case. Speaking in a Noo Yawk accent so thick he might as well walk around with a Nathan's Famous in his pistol holster, Roth's character instantly hones in on the billionaire as the prime suspect and speaks of taking down this rich, superior asshole as if getting even with the system on his lonesome. Yet Roth sleepwalks through this quest for roundabout social justice, failing to even muster up the will to truly intimidate the young black man (Nate Parker)—with priors, of course—who could hold the key to taking down Miller. Everyone in this movie acts with all the conviction of a bored high school student forced to read a passage of Shakespeare aloud.

Jarecki wraps their disinterested wheel-spinning in astonishingly banal direction; lighting has never stood out so powerfully to me for its mediocrity, and at no point does the director visually communicate that someone like Miller runs this country and makes the rules. Jarecki aims for shades of Chinatown with Arbitrage's conclusion, though it lacks any of the sick humor and committed nihilism of that film. Rather than depict an insurmountable system maintaining its status quo at all costs, this movie presents a handful of po-faced dopes who speak only to their own uselessness. No one truly pushes back against the powers that be, so the audience is left with no feeling that those powers cannot be bested. Like the center-right liberals with whom it aligns, Arbitrage plays at outrage with a societal evil but makes no move to attack it before declaring the situation hopeless and inalterable.

Robot & Frank (Jake Schreier, 2012)

Befitting a movie about a man losing his memory, Frank Langella's character in Robot & Frank is also named Frank to keep things simple. And true to the title, his companion is a robot, assigned to care for the old man. Afflicted with not-explicitly-stated-but-obviously Alzheimer's disease, Frank gradually reveals himself to be a retired thief, still capable of pulling off small grabs and even intricate break-ins but less able to remember what it is he wants to steal, or why it is an awful idea in the first place. Initially resistant to the idea of having his diet and activity controlled by an eerily pleasant, vaguely humanoid being, Frank soon relents when he learns that he can convince his caretaker to assist in burglaries.

That Frank's children (James Marsden and Liv Tyler) did not think to program the robot to prevent their once-incarcerated father from committing further crimes speak to how little they think the addled man can do, an unwitting admission of their perfunctory sense of filial duty. As Frank slowly bonds with his personal trainer and eventual accomplice, the robot becomes a complex repository for the emotionally (and, often, physically) absent parent to both vent his frustration with his kids and to vicariously attempt to make amends with them. So effortlessly does Langella invest these feelings into the emotional void of his "co-star" that Robot & Frank works best when its thin commitment to a narrative evaporates and lets the actor simply inhabit his odd role.

Only for a brief window, in fact, does the storyline truly mesh with the film's emotional content in such a way that neither is sacrificed for the sake of the other. This synergy owes to the emotional investment Langella gives Frank's lingering need to steal, possibly the only thing that makes him feel like himself as so much slips away to dementia. Occasionally, he confides in his robot pal how he wishes he could have planned jobs with his children, his inability to share his greatest happiness with his greatest loves a regret he cannot forget.

As for the "heists" themselves, however, these setpieces serve only to insert story into a film working just fine with its less propulsive, more insular conflicts. Whether the initial break-in of a library on the cusp of conversion into a social museum for hipsters or the spiteful plan to steal from the hipster-in-chief (Jeremy Strong) in charge of this travesty of art and knowledge, Frank's heists do not follow through on the sense of irony and buried affection in the preparation the old thief puts into these jobs. When training the robot to use its super-human mechanical abilities for crime or reinvigorating his own brain with a focus and determination it has not had in years, Frank injects deadpan humor and life into the picture. But the big shows lack the lackadaisical charm and subtle insights of the rehearsals, and they gradually lead to an overactive story that reaches for big emotions and shameless plays on Frank's mental condition (which affects short- and long-term memory at the convenience of the plot), culminating in a twist so offensive in its casual manipulation of mental illness that the already eroding goodwill I had for the film evaporated.

Nevertheless,Nevertheless, Robot & Frank often manages to be quirky without all the tedium that term now entails. Langella's mixture of irascibility and regret gives the moments with Frank's children extra bite, even tragedy. Tyler's Madison rails at the notion of her brother pawning off their dad on a robot, but she decries Hunter from the convenient safe zone of her constant world travel, something even Frank, who pushes his son away, directly notes. When she finally does shows up in a fit of Luddite self-righteousness, she interrupts her father's scheme and prompts Frank to go to darkly amusing lengths to alienate his daughter and get his partner in crime reactivated. Marsden, on the other hand, gets to share some of Langella's pathos as the son who, despite rarely seeing his father as a child, tries his hardest to care for his dad, sacrificing his free time to drive hours at a time to tend to a man who does not want his help. And true to Frank's complex, mordantly funny/painful views of his children, the best moment of the busy climax concerns the old man playing on his son's strained affections one last time, using Hunter's desire for reciprocated acceptance to make the poor man an accessory. That Langella can play this almost sadistic exploitation for laughs without diving into caustic irony is a testament to the easy humanity and puckishness of his performance. That the film relegates this moment to but one minor moment within a distracting, clumsy, caper story is a testament to its wasted potential.

Leaves of Grass

A stuttering mash-up of drama and stoner comedy, Tim Blake Nelson's Leaves of Grass plays as a cross between the podunk classicism of O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the spiritual vacuum-cum-autobiography of Midwestern Jewry of A Serious Man. Bill Kincaid (Edward Norton), philosophy professor at Brown and, soon, Harvard, teaches his students about the illusion of control and centered balance in life just before his own life proves his point. Identical twin Brady lures his brother back to their redneck home in Oklahoma by faking his death, only to trap the poor educator in a hare-brained scheme to get out of trouble with a major pot dealer in the Tulsa region (Richard Dreyfuss, who continues to look as if he's pissed off even to keep getting work).

Coenesque in conception but not execution, Leaves of Grass attempts to build a twisted comedy of errors as well as a philosophical treatise on issues of God, free will and fate, but it cannot reconcile its stiff gear shifts between moods and the fatal gaps in momentum that derail it constantly. Where A Serious Man built a thriller-like sense of dread from its comic severity and mounting sense of spiritual despair, Leaves of Grass attempts to do the same in reverse, saddling a conventional narrative with so much extra weight that the bridge collapses. Norton shines as the two brothers, giving a performance reminiscent of Nicolas Cage's in Adaptation, in that even when the brothers groom themselves to look alike for Brady's plan, you can instantly tell which brother is which without Norton uttering a word. A strong supporting cast buoys him, from the always-transfixing Keri Russell as the poetry-lovin' catfish wrangler who steal Bill's heart to Steve Earle as a half-joking rival dealer sour for being edged out by Brady's superior product (though less ambitious than his professorial brother, Brady supposedly has the higher IQ and used it to grow hyper-quality weed via hydroponics).

Nelson here falls back on his theatrical training, never making anything particularly cinematic. With the exception of scenes in cars, everything in the film looks as if it could have been a set design, even outdoor shots. A subplot involving a skittish, broken orthodontist (Josh Pais) works neither as comedy nor dramatic thread, and a lovesick coed who hounds an uncomfortable Bill with poems in Latin and threatens his potential promotion to Harvard might have worked as a tendril of the man's mounting pressures had all of the young woman's scenes not played out in tedious predictability. Of course she starts undressing in Bill's office, and if you think that door isn't going to be opened at the worst time, then you made an odd choice for what is clearly the first film you have ever seen. Only rarely does anyone not project past the nonexistent proscenium, such as a tender, believable moment when Bill drunkenly hits on Russell's Janet in that awkward manner that suggests he's not only rusty at picking up chicks but is interested in more than sex.

Nelson appears to have a chip on his shoulder about growing up in Tulsa and looking like a redneck while trying to prove himself as a learned literature freak and Shakespearean thespian -- a frustration with which I can empathize. That makes Whitman his ideal conduit, the poet's original cover for his own Leaves of Grass displaying merely his rugged portrait that belied the beauty within, but Nelson gets caught up in the plot over the mood. A shaggy dog jokes only works if you can control the audience's interest, setting up the joke for so long that the crowd loses interest only to climb back on board when the monologue continues and people commit to hearing the end of it. Nelson doesn't have the Coens' ability to string along an audience, and the punchline is less a dark, anti-climatic punch than a mere caesura that, like the end of a verse in Walt Whitman's rule-breaking poetry, indicates that the proceedings are over simply because the characters stop speaking.

Still, it's got a goofy charm at times. For all its flaws, stop-starts and misjudged laughs, Leaves of Grass certainly doesn't make me think of a host of other films to compare it to, save for the Coen brothers, and they're not bad role models when it comes to anti-comedy. Nelson was supposedly the only person to have actually read Homer's The Odyssey during the production of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and he strives for a greater respect of the arts in his vision of that fine line that separates suburbia from rural backwoods in states with few cities. Besides, how many stoner movies are structured as treatises on Socratic dialogue?