Film Carew

Rian Johnson is 38 years old, which means the filmmaker had just turned 22 when Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys landed on screens. It obviously etched in his memory: Looper, his latest film, takes a similar tack to time travel, and even casts Bruce Willis as another bald prisoner, fired back from the future, on-the-lam in an unforgiving dystopian 'now'. Cinema is, of course, one of mankind's greatest forms of time travel, and this double Willis phenomenon says nothing of the fact that the 12 Monkeys was written by David Peoples, who owed his screenplay to a formative viewing of Chris Marker's La Jetée, that eternal essay-film staple of cinematic study (which is to say nothing of Peoples also writing the script for Blade Runner, which Looper also loops back to).

In La Jetée, Marker effectively distilled the paradox of existence — to live life forever in the face of imminent death — to a single still-photographic instant; a chronicle of a death foretold in memories and photography; Marker one of the first to see how the two, in the 20th century, begun to blur. But he also held true to that tenet of sci-fi conceit, where coming face-to-face with one's past or future self is to be staunchly avoided. Here, a prosthetically-aided Joseph Gordon-Levitt meets his future Bruce Willis, and the pair become some kind of ephemeral buddy-cop team, busting each other's balls across the very plains of possibility, the fate of each inextricably wed to the fate of the other; they one-and-the-same even as they play the part of the young hothead or the crotchety old-timer.

The scenes of either/or on the run are the least interesting part of the picture; instead, Johnson's cinematic world is what's worth discussing. As with Brick — his debut feature, and first collaboration with leading man JGL — the auteur, here, imposes the noir form on an unexpected locale; borrowing the “20th century affectations” of hard men in sharp suits and imposing them on a thoughtfully-imagined future. The film's present is a 2044 in which time travel has yet to be invented; it's merely the past that due-to-executed bodies are dispatched back to for killing and burying. And it's a 2044 which takes the current state of American — a country with a yawning chasm between its rich and poor, in which a metropolis like Detroit can become an abandoned wilderness — and blows it up to a dystopian extreme: those few that have money existing in various forms of ivory tower, the streets overrun by beggars, vagrants, and petty criminals; the plague of the homeless milling in the background like soon-to-be zombies awaiting an outbreak.

Gordon-Levitt is an executioner dispatching the future's zapped-back criminal garbage with the rote drudgery of a factory-worker. An early (somewhat embarrassing) montage shows our hitman's a creature of routine; obediently following procedure yet secretly squirreling away a portion of his silver, keeping it safe for that escape, when he heads off into the sunset an unburdened man, absolved of his sins and free from this hellish life. It's a tired trope that Johnson quickly, happily mocks; having Gordon-Levitt offering his silver — and a piece of his dream of a better life — to the down-and-out hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold (Piper Perabo!), only for her to mock it as a fool's pipedream, a romantic projection on both her and the future. This dream-of-a-better life cuts both ways in Looper, which, as much as it's about time-travel and fate and possible worlds et al, is a study in why time-travel is a persistent trope in fiction, about the very experience of temporality. Whether it's travelling back or to the future, this idea is so alive to the human mind because people are so very rarely present in the immediate instant; forever flipping back and forth between memories and daydreams, nostalgically remembering the past or romantically dreaming of the future. Taking this dramatic impetus from human impulse gives Looper a weight that keeps it grounded in its many silly moments; like those quirks of caricature familiar from Brick and The Brothers Bloom (a con-man movie that mixed sub-Wes-Anderson whimsy with a secretly career-defining turn from Rachel Weisz), or the manifold tedious chase sequences, or the introduction of an evil kid seemingly beamed in from some '90s J-Horror picture. The film is, true to its nature, best when it artfully pirouettes through memories and/or visions of the future; and it all ends with a climax that shows the influence of 12 Monkeys — and, in turn, La Jetée — lingering long and lasting.

“I'm a patriarch, that's my role!” yelps Richard Gere, and, in the weird world of Arbitrage, this is supposed to be a noble thing. Freshly turned 60, Dicky G is the Man Who Has It All: the king of a hedge-fund empire, with socialite wife, children ready to inherit the family biz, and a hot piece of French ass on the side. Of course, given the phrase 'hedge-fund' is in there, you know this is all soon to come tumbling down; his empire a house of cards built on a flawed foundation. Sure enough, he's leveraged this and owes that, a deal's not being closed and some guy's demanding his $4mil by yesterday, and, suddenly, his hot piece of French ass is dead. At this point, it feels as if writer/director Nicholas Jarecki (another Jarecki family filmmaker, yes; his only prior credit, though, a documentary chronicling James Toback at work(!)) is making a portrait of not just an individual empire in freefall, but the American empire itself. Something is rotten in the state of New York, and this philandering billionaire cad is a sure sign of such cultural putrefaction; the fish, after all, rotting from the head.

Yet, sadly, Arbitrage takes a really weird turn when the hot piece of French ass dies: it becomes a film about a plucky billionaire, out to put all right with the world by putting himself back on top. After a stint as a beaten man — hobbled with fractured ribs and a gash on his head, easily toyed with by Tim Roth's hard-bitten cop — Gere soon gets back on his feet, and back into the game. The journey's almost exactly the same as that which Batman undertakes in The Dark Knight Rises: the beaten, bowed, bruised billionaire playboy gritting his teeth and sacrificing himself in order to make sure justice prevails. Like Christopher Nolan's misanthropic blockbuster, Arbitrage makes the hero flawed; there a desire, here, for Gere's oligarch to feel Shakespearean — uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, et al — and for his frosty, venomous relationship with said society wife (Susan Sarandon, no less) and his immoral manipulation of his virtuous, company-man daughter (Brit Marling, slumming it after her blithely awesome turn in Sound Of My Voice) a kind of necessary evil. A final scene in which the Family applauds each other — and is applauded — at a gala dinner honouring the patriarch suggests that Jarecki may even see his film as a critique of the 1%; Arbitrage about all the evil that goes on behind the scenes, that bankrolls the friendly façade of American wealth, success, and hyper-capitalist largesse.

But if this is a critique, it's an affectionate one, at best; after all Gere is, just like Bruce Wayne, made hero of this narrative; with the film even picking up in the third act when Dicky G, seemingly on his way to rack, ruin, and the state pen, suddenly gets his groove back with a midnight 'a-ha!' revelation that leads him to foiling the cops, closing the big deal, and consoling the grieving, absolving dead mom of the hot piece of French ass at her (the hot piece of French ass') funeral. Kill all the sexy gallery gals you like, Big Dick, as long as you nail that big negotiation. How else would America persist, so flush with cash to sink into mediocre entertainments like this?