★ ★ ★★ ☆
Rejoice, fans of silver foxes and Eighties love-gods. A week after Richard Gere scorched the screen as a billionaire morphine addict in The Benefactor, he’s back, and this time he’s on camera for nearly every frame.
Time Out of Mindplays like the perfect flipside to The Benefactor, casting Gere not as a billionaire but as a booze-addled vagrant called George, who mumbles and snorts his way from park benches to homeless shelters during an unforgiving New York winter.
European in both tone and narrative (like a Dardenne brothers movie,Rosettaor The Son), it immerses you in George’s street-level reality and finds gritty drama in his daily struggle to find food and shelter in an often openly hostile city (he gets regularly turfed out of hospital waiting rooms while protesting, “I’m not bothering anyone here.”)
In every scene, the 66- year-old Gere is magnetic — as a serious, world-class actor, he has become the quintessential late bloomer. He manages to convey inner turmoil and seething self-hatred through stares, sighs and grimaces alone. Whether filmed through windows, behind doors, around corners, and often with hidden cameras (a scene where he begs for money, crying, “Spare change, help me out”, is shot on the streets for real), you can’t keep your eyes off him.
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Indeed, Time Out of Mind might have been a five-star movie except that, even with five days of stubble, a terrifying buzz-cut and some seriously floppy man-boobs, Richard Gere is still, very much, a dazzling thing to behold. Too dazzling, at times, to convince completely as homeless George.
Oren Moverman, 15, 118min