RICHARD GERE, BEN VEREEN IN TIME OUT OF MIND

How a star can go unrecognized: panhandling at Astor Place

As a director the accomplished Israel-born, New York resident movie writer Oren Moverman (he penned the script for the inventive Bob Dylan biography I'm Not There) had hitherto relied on aggressive performances by Woody Harrelson (in The Messenger and Rampart). He chooses a gentler star and a more vérité approach in Time Out of Mind, using the glamorous, sexy Richard Gere (who also produced) as a homeless person. It's stunt casting that in practical terms pays off. The homeless are so faceless Gere "auditioned" successfully by panhandling at Astor Place for forty minutes. Nobody gave him a cent and nobody recognized or really even saw him. Does Gere disappear into the role for us? Not quite. But there's a message in this performance: all homelessness is a reduction, a fall from the grace of a stable life. And there's no doubt Gere loses himself in the role, and in the street and shelter life his character is forced to live in the first scene, when a no-nonsense building manager (Steve Buscemi) throws him out of the trashed Brooklyn apartment an ex-girlfriend has been evicted from. From then on, George Hammond (Gere) is the victim of circumstance, striving merely to get food and drink (he has an alcohol problem) and some place to sleep.

Unlike the odd romantic couple of young New York street junkies in the Safdie brothers' Heaven Knows What, George is not part of a readymade street culture, but a newcomer. He is defensive every step of the way, trying to get back into any place he's kicked out of (including the initial apartment), and at first we think he's a regular guy who's fallen on sudden hard luck. Only later we realize that George in his own words is "just a fuck-up. Probably always was," has lived off various women for years, has had no job for years either, and is not even quite all there mentally.

While Moverman hardly develops a plot, Gere gradually builds a character -- out of nothing, because a clearcut backstory is studiously avoided. Time Out of Mind is a fine picture in its way. There is the old problem here of how you depict boredom and monotony without being boring and monotonous. George Hammond (Gere's character) has drunken afternoons and long nights on benches and in ER waiting rooms that bring distinctive longeurs for the viewer. Long subway rides don't have the benefit of our knowing the fugue will end as in the recent Asperger's boy drama Stand Clear of the Clsing Doors. Nor is there the complex plot that develops behind a homeless shelter meeting of father and son Robert De Niro and Paul Dano in Being Flynn. If there can be no back-story there can be no plot history: we must live in the moment -- the life struggling for daily survival forces on a person.

But there are scenes (encounters with a homeless woman played by Kyra Sedgwick who tells her story, a prolonged relationship with a homeless black jazzman played by Ben Vereen) that add considerable color, besides the documentary realism of depicting a number of nights at the old Bellevue, formerly the city mental hospital, now New York's biggest men's shelter, that provide milieu and human interest. Dixon (Vereen) is a motor-mouth. He becomes annoying (particularly to George) but is also a buddy for George and entertainment for us who brings humanity and laughs to a dreary survival scene. But George is on his own, as is most vividly depicted in his spacey encounters with the bureaucracy seeking to go from nowhere man and nobody to someone with an I.D., a birth certificate, and rights to public assistance. By now we know he needs it.

The movie is a constant battle between narrative and non-narrative elements, and this is a battle Moverman, whose script is based on a story by Jeffrey Caine, author of the film adaptation of John Le Carré's The Constant Gardener, finally surrenders to narrative. Story arc takes over when George's repeated brief encounters with his estranged daughter Maggie (Jena Malone) lead to a final hint of possible rapprochement. Moverman just couldn't leave his star completely out in the cold. In Time Out of Mind pros like Sedgwick, Vereen, Gere, Geraldine Hughes, and others blend into the documentary-style milieu, but things still tend to feel scripted, and, remembering the pleasure of Being Flynn's intricate narrative, one half wishes narrative had won out earlier here.

Time Out of Mind, 107 mins., debuted at Toronto. It was screened for this review as part of the 52nd New York Film Festival. At the post-screening Q&A, it emerged that the whole project was begun by Gere, who has long been involved with an organization to aid the homeless. Like the Safdie brothers' Heven Knows What (also in the 2014 NYFF Main Slate), this film is steeped in New York City atmosphere. Opening in US theaters 9 September 2015.


RICHARD GERE @ P&I Q&A [CK Photo]

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