Launching the Essential Independents: American Cinema, Now film festival at the Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas on 26 May is the Australian premiere of Richard Gere’s near-solo performance in Time Out of Mind.
Independent, or “Indy” films, invite images of cutting edge cinema unstrained by the stereotyping and predictability that the big Hollywood studios are often accused of. Some of it is arty, some of it challenging, and, like all things, there’s a lot of hit and miss in the experimentation that independence allows.
Time Out of Mind succeeds and fails for differing reasons. Director and screenwriter Oren Moverman, who co-developed the story with Jeffrey Caine, lets us follow the life of George (Gere), a down-on-his-luck man who struggles with homelessness, mental illness and reconnecting with his estranged daughter.
Bobby Bukowski’s cinematography is both refreshing and superb. Moverman quite literally makes us peak at George’s life, often from a distance: through windows, behind doors, or looking down from a rooftop. In doing so, we overhear snippets of disembodied conversations from the location of the camera while George’s life occurs before us in the distance. Everyone has problems, and this is what we pick up from those snatches of other lives.
George himself doesn’t speak much, but is often spoken to and, again, we rarely see the speaker. The voices of the faceless ‘others’ give us a taste of how disconnected George has become from the world, or perhaps it’s the world that has cut him loose: when he stands on the street begging, countless others walk by without so much as acknowledging his presence. The exception to his disconnected reality are his case workers who try to make a connection with him but never quite succeed. They are rarely a mockery or a bureaucrat but, rather, genuine people doing the best they can to help their clients.
Taking up residence at Bellevue Hospital, a shelter for homeless men, George befriends Dixon (Ben Vereen) whose incessant chatter and enthusiasm for life eventually gives George that missing spark to – we hope – begin getting his life back on track.
While Moverman successfully avoids turning his screenplay into an angst-ridden drama, he does plod along at too leisurely a pace and, at 2 hours, that does begin to wear thin. There’s not a lot of humour in this drama and the odd comical line is a welcome relief.
Richard Gere and his fellow support cast are all in fine form and Gere gives one of his most sublime performances, expressing so much with so few words.
Time Out of Mind is a fine piece of cinema and one very worthy of opening a film festival, but like many artistic works, it can be an acquired taste that requires patience and after-thought.
Reviewed by Rod Lewis
Twitter: @StrtegicRetweet
Rating out of 10: 6
Time Out of Mind will open the Essential Independents: American Cinema, Now film festival on 26 May 2016, then screen again on 29 May 2016, exclusively at the Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas.
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