Movie review: ‘Time Out of Mind’

Decades after An Officer and a Gentleman, Richard Gere hasn’t quite shaken the image of the silver fox, even if recent roles have been less swoon-worthy. In Time Out of Mind, however, he kisses glamour goodbye as a homeless New Yorker drifting between shelters and park benches.

According to Gere, he’d wanted to play the part for years, but was looking for the perfect writer and director to help transform a somewhat conventional script by Jeffrey Caine. Enter Oren Moverman, the outside-the-box thinker whose credits include directing the Academy Award-nominated The Messenger and co-writing Love & Mercy and I’m Not There. As the movie opens, Gere’s George is being kicked out of the apartment where he has been squatting. A contractor (Steve Buscemi) finds him sleeping in the bathtub and forces George to take up his suitcase and leave.

We next see him — through the apartment window — on the street, as we listen to the voice of Buscemi’s character, discussing business as usual. The contrast is powerful: As George meanders through the city, New Yorkers go about their lives, barely noticing him. Moverman continues this leitmotif throughout, filming Gere through dirty windows, in reflection and from the roofs of buildings, partially obscuring George or literally pushing him to the margins of our field of vision, and giving the film a gritty, naturalistic feel.

The loose narrative tightens when George checks into a shelter. There, he meets Dixon (Ben Vereen), a motormouth who claims to be a former jazz musician and who becomes George’s daytime companion. George also spends time covertly following his estranged daughter, Maggie (Jena Malone), a musician and bartender. Like George, the movie sometimes dillydallies, but the unhurried rhythms ultimately have a hypnotic effect.

Though Gere acts his heart out, it’s not always enough to transcend the sense that we’re watching a movie star play a homeless man. When George ascends the stairs of his new shelter, for example, Gere’s posture is that of an executive on his way to a meeting, not a man who has been broken and homeless for a decade. He also doesn’t have the appearance of a man who has been subsisting mainly on beer.

But Gere’s performance more often closes the gap between reality and fiction. Leaving his squat for the last time, as George turns to watch the door close behind him, the mix of fear and resignation is agonizingly palpable. A facial expression is all it takes for us to feel, for a moment, the terrifying reality of life on the street.

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This story was originally published October 16, 2015 at 9:32 AM with the headline "Movie review: ‘Time Out of Mind’."