GAD ALMALEH AND HIPPOLYTE GIRARDOT IN CAPITAL

Costa-Gavras takes a poke at global capitalism

Costa-Gavras (Konstantínos Gavrás ) is the famous 80-year-old director of political thrillers born in Greece and based in France. Throughout his nearly fifty-year career, sometimes he has delivered zingers, and sometimes really not. The moral passion of a European leftist has always been there. But the viewpoint has only made for compelling cinema when Costa-Gavras has found a screenplay with drive and suspense built into it. That is true with his two Academy Award winners, Z and Missing. But in other high profile films, State of Siege, Amen, Music Box, The Confession, Hanna K, and Betrayed, those qualities have sometimes been absent. His last film, Eden Is West , released in 2008 and starring the Italian heartthrob Ricardo Scarmarcio, was a meandering, improvised oddity about a generic if charismatic illegal immigrant. It referred to a big social issue, but said nothing forceful about it, nor did it have much force as a film.

Now Costa-Gavras has taken on one of today's biggest issues: how the power of money rules -- and may be wrecking -- the world. It's not one of his great zingers, but for a while it comes close. The film is adapted from a French novel by Stéphane Osmont (apparently the pen name of a bank officer) that deliberately references Karl Marx's tractatus, Capital, and takes on the rapacious manipulativeness of the great investment banks and hedge funds that caused the world crisis of 2008. The protagonist, Marc Tourneuil, is the younger favorite of his bank's CEO. When this man, Jack Marmande (Daniel Mesguich), must step aside due to testicular cancer, the older, more powerful board members choose Tourneuil to take the reins of the bank, known as Phénix, because they think he'll be easy to manipulate.

Tourrneuil has different ideas. He really takes charge, as is clear from the first handover meeting. When one of the principals balks at this and calls for his immediate removal, he's told that now it's too late, or too early, to remove him. Tourneuil tells his wife he wants the big bonuses his new position will bring only for the prestige they carry. While competition and raw acquisitiveness were the emotions that drove Michael Douglas' blowhard Gordon Gekko, with his blunt declaration that "Greed is good" in Oliver Stone's Wall Street, Tourneuil is somewhat different. Gad Elmaleh, who plays him, is a popular French standup comic of Jewish origin born in Morocco who has a suave, modest manner and a cool composure. These qualities help make him seem an interestingly contradictory protagonist. Sometimes speaking in voiceover with wonderment about his situation, Tourneuil appears almost a kind of proletarian mole. He's a cocky outsider who both seeks to win and may be trying to destroy from within the great instrument of international capitalism he's at the head of. Because the system seems against him, he turns against it. The way he exercises power has a chilly, elegant French style utterly unlike the oily Gekko's. But of course the source book and Costa-Gavras' movie are attacks on global capitalism and the way it favors an oligarchy of the very rich. Tourneuil may seem like an outsider but he still enacts policies that lead to mass redundancies and upsurges in stock values.

When an American hedge fund company based in Miami headed by a partner in the French bank called Dittmar Rigule (Gabriel Byrne) tries to manipulate Tourneuil and take over Phénix, and he knows he has enemies at home too, Tourneuil turns into a potential whistleblower, poised to expose everybody's manipulations.

At times Costa-Gavras in effect turns directly to the audience to deliver his homilies about the evils of global capitalism. The whole film starts to seem like a lecture -- if one with first rate cast and great looking locations. The film is skillful and fast-moving enough so that we're still interested when this happens. But after a while the account of the manipulations and Tourneuil's career is no longer compelling or specific enough to sustain our excitement. Dittmar's constant nagging appearances via Skype (or the like) to push Tourneuil to buy up a Japanese bank, a ruse to weaken the French bank and make it ripe for takeover, are repetitious and one-note. It's not a good role for Byrne, who, speaking only English in this predominantly French-language film, seems to have no one to play off. Sometimes his lines aren't even clear. The experienced actors who play the main other principals in the French bank, Hippolyte Girardot and Bernard Le Coq, also prominent in the 2011 Sarkozy film The Conquest, are appealing and have authority, but seem more chess pieces than real people.

Tourneuil is given several personal contexts -- his faithful, but disappointed, wife Diane (an appealing Natacha Régnier); his own family (seen only once at a big luncheon); an exotic international super-model called Nassim (Liya Kebede) who seems dragged in to add sex appeal and factitious complexity; it's never clear what Nassim is up to or why Tourneuil is so fascinated by her. At the luncheon Tourneuil's uncle Bruno (Jean-Marie Frin) delivers a tirade about how financial oligarchs feed stockholders' selfish interests and destroy labor, something indeed Tourneuil has dutifully been doing -- reducing staff all over to increase stock values. Tourneuil answers Bruno that the world has provided what the left always used to call for: internationalism. The electronic trinkets he's given his kids to play with may be made by children, but their origins are multinational.

This debate may be lively and even a bit witty, but the movie action has clearly stopped dead to accommodate it. Almaleh's dry coolness is interesting for a while, but he lacks the physical presence to be a convincing CEO. He hasn't the hard edge Yvan Attal (also a small man) had in a similar role in Lucas Belvaux's exciting 2009 true-story French thriller of a kidnapped CEO, Rapt. Céline Sallette is excellent as another woman in Tourneuil's life, a Japan expert, but this plot line is left dangling as the middle of the film begins to meander and lose focus.

You can see where Capital falls short as contemporary French political cinema if you compare it with Pierre Schoeller's terrific 2011 film about a non-elite French high government official, The Minister (L'Ecercise de l'Étât). Schoeller presents key general issues forcefully but his action is utterly original and specific, and the result as exciting as all get out. Costa-Gavras' new film his plenty of glitz and verve -- many of the scenes are grand and elegant, but the plot starts to seem abstract and theoretical. Typical for the director, but unlike Schoeller's film, there's also never a pause for breath or a change of pace, which only works when what's happening is really suspenseful. Still Capital moves fast, and it's fun for most of the way to watch a movie that's smart and reveals the power of money as something more than just the business of a Wall Street shark. But ultimately economics is not really Costa-Gavras' forte.

Capital, 114 mins., debuted at Toronto in September 2012 and released in France 14 Nov. 2012, when it did poorly with critics (Allociné press rating 2.4). Ir released (limited) in the US 25 Oct. 2013. Screened for this review 31 Oct. 2013 at Regal Union Square, NYC.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.