An entertaining but reprehensible movie

"Arbitrage" is a reasonably entertaining story about a guy who has it all and then totally screws up,putting his family, fortune, and status at risk - except that we've seen so many movies and stories of this type, especially since the crash of 08, that the movie feels old and shopworn already. Essentially, it's Bernie Madoff meets Bonfire of the Vanities: two strands to the plot, loosely but effectively tied together. First Robert Miller, aptly played by Richard Gere, runs some kind of huge eponymous hedge fund, and he's trying to sell the firm to a large bank at huge profit but to do so he puts all kinds of fake transactions on the books, to make firm look bigger and more secure than it is. If this scheme, similar in some ways to Madoff's, is discovered he'll face major jail time - and maybe his kids will, too, as this is a family operation, with his beloved daughter, improbably, as his chief of finance. Other side of the plot: Gere is carrying on with some ridiculous French gallery owner about a third his age; he take her for a drive upstate,car crashes, she dies, and he tries ineptly to cover his tracks. A rumpled and unfastidious detective takes pursuit. Gere's world seems about to crash down upon him: on the family side, daughter discovers the fraud and is furious that her dad is a fallen idol (wife, Susan Sarandon, in a small role, too bad, because she improves every movie she's in) has known all along that Gere is a callow cad. On the business side, Gere and his legal team come up with a highly unlikely discovery of evidence tampering, Gere is cleared, everything's good. The ending - Gere receiving a charity award - is slightly ambiguous, as we wonder whether Gere might confess all, though it should be obvious he won't: he's a despicable character from the first frame. What really troubles me about Arbitrage is that I think so many who see the movie will salivate about his gorgeous lifestyle - the penthouse, the private jet, the limos, the clothes, the babes, the fine wines and liquor - and think, yeah, it's worth it, why not go for the the $, cheat if you have to, they all do it. It's Wall Street advanced 20 years, but now it's not greed is good - that's just a given today - but now it's crime pays. In Bonfire (the books, not the movie, which along with everyone else I did not see) the character suffers Job-like for his sin (leaving a dead boy after a car crash in the Bronx) and finally he grows, changes. Nobody changes in Arbitrage - everyone's vindicated. Entertaining movie, but in some ways a reprehensible one as well.