(Article) And the rich shall inherit the woes - "Cosmopolis" mention

The conflicted rich, those in the gray areas, are the new attractive movie bad guys.

startribune The movie bad guy may wear a black hat, but gray has always been his color. Lately, it seems, Gray is showing up in a Brioni suit with a diversified portfolio of several billion dollars.

That filmmakers would have their eye on Wall Street and the morality of unfettered capitalism is hardly a shock. Nor is the idea that the world of high finance could provide meaty villains or, at least, intriguingly disreputable characters. Rich people are fantasy figures; the country's continuing economic woes make them topical, and their sorrows generate vicarious joy.

Equally important, a conflicted conscience makes for good drama. It may be, as Jean Renoir once said, that the hell of life is that everyone has his or her reasons. But it's those reasons that make questionable characters intriguing, nuanced and something more than animals. It's what separates Bruce Wayne from Bruce the Shark.

"Why is the public so interested in movies about the wealthy?" said Nicholas Jarecki, whose debut narrative feature, "Arbitrage," stars Richard Gere as a compromised commodities trader scrambling to save his fortune and his family. "My answer is that Shakespeare wrote about kings. That's where the action is. And it's the classic cathartic thing. You get to indulge in a lifestyle you're not part of, a tragic error leads to a downfall, and you get to say, 'Thank God I'm not him.'"

Creating really interesting ne'er-do-wells, and giving them currency, also hinges on "the scope of the villainy," said the director David Cronenberg, whose current drama, "Cosmopolis," adapted from the novel by Don DeLillo, follows an unconscionably wealthy Wall Street trader on a trip to a haircut, or hell, depending on one's point of view.

"I think it's a matter of reach," Cronenberg said by phone from Toronto. "For example, I watched 'The Killing,' the American version, on TV, and there's a lot of politics to it, and the mayor of Seattle is corrupt and all that. But even if he is corrupt, how far does the corruption reach? Not that far.(::)

The main characters of "Arbitrage" and "Cosmopolis" fit into a newer tradition of far squishier protagonists. See "Boiler Room" from 2000, "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps" (2010), "Margin Call" from last year and even the current documentary "The Queen of Versailles," Lauren Greenfield's film about a fabulously wealthy family laid low, in which schadenfreude plays a major factor.

And yet fictional heroes need redeeming qualities, which is why Cronenberg wanted Robert Pattinson as the star of his film.

"Quite a few critics have talked about him being icy and all that, but the fact is that even as a vampire he's pretty warm and attractive," Cronenberg said, referring to the actor's "Twilight" role. "I think he's likable, and I wanted that, probably for the same reason they wanted Richard Gere for 'Arbitrage.' "