If you haven’t read part 1 yet – it is here. Part 2 is here.
Day 35 – I’m Not There, 2007. The star of this non-linear biopic is Bob Dylan as portrayed by six different actors: Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, Marcus Carl Franklin, Richard Gere and Christian Bale. It is an unusual and effective way to look at a complicated and changing personality, and the creation of a legend, as the characters personify different aspects of our ideas about Dylan. Cate Blanchett has the most compelling interpretation of Dylan’s personality, and Gere’s the most bewildering. He’s an actor playing Billy the Kid in a surreal western, complete with giraffe, while watching a band play at a funeral. MUSIC NOTE: During Gere’s segment, Jim James and Calexico play Going to Acapulco in an eerie rendition of the 1967 version with The Band.
Directed by Todd Haynes. RECOMMEND.
Day 36 – The Flock, 2007. A movie about sexual deviants is not my favorite topic, but Gere, as a single-minded, humorless social worker with an unappetizing caseload (the flock) of rapists, fetishists and killers, is more than convincing. As in The Hunting Party, Gere plays an irascible character with short hair and a stubble. Claire Danes as his trainee/partner with an alluded to-but-never-explained unstable background does little more than constantly flip her hair out of her eyes. The movie is creepy with several stomach-churning scenes.
Directed by Andrew Lau.
Day 37- Nights in Rodanthe, 2008. As I have not read Nicholas Sparks’ book, I can’t comment on the differences between the movie and book versions, but the movie is sentimental and cliched. That aside, if you are in the mood for a tearjerker and a glass of wine – some good old fashioned schmaltz – I would heartily recommend it. In their third match-up, Diane Lane plays a separated woman whose boorish and manipulative husband wants to reunite. She meets Gere at a remote B&B that she is manning for a friend, played by Viola Davis, during an impending hurricane. Gere is a doctor who is running from his past, and is estranged from his son. Although Gere is 59 in this movie (Lane is 43), he still smolders quietly.
Directed by George C. Wolfe.
Day 38 – Amelia, 2009. In this conventional biopic, Hilary Swank nevertheless does a fine job with the role of Earhart. She is convincing in that she resembles Earhart physically — slim, big smile, short hair — but the character is done is broad strokes, without actually delving into her early life. It is more an impression than an in-depth character study. Gere, as her publisher husband, George P. Putnam, is persuasive as the canny merchandiser and loving and supportive husband. An affair with Gene Vidal (Ewan McGregor) and father of Gore is alluded to, but is not really developed. The best parts in this movie are the transcendent, beautifully photographed flights, particularly the last one, which uses the historically accurate dialogue in the radio dispatches.
Directed by Mira Nair.
Day 39 – Hachi: A Dog’s Tale, 2009. This is a true story that originated in 1930s Japan and was adapted from a Japanese film. Gere, a music professor, is completely convincing as a besotted new Akita puppy owner he adopts as a stray at the train station. Despite his wife’s initial protestations (Joan Allen), the puppy stays, and the story unfolds as a calm and touching meditation on a dog’s bond with its owner, its innate desire to please, and the love and loyalty that years of devotion reveal between the two. Anyone who has ever loved a dog will weep buckets of tears in this movie. MUSIC NOTE: Gere plays the piano. LOCATION NOTE: There is a large bronze statue at Shibuya Station in Tokyo commemorating the faithful dog owned by University of Tokyo Professor Ueno.
Directed by Lasse Hallstrom. RECOMMEND.
Day 40 – Brooklyn’s Finest, 2009. There are three separate but intertwined stories in this violent and profane morality tale that predictably culminates in one grand semi-bloodbath of a finale. The acting is intense and convincing. Gere plays a depressed, lonely cop on the verge of retirement. His partner, Ethan Hawke, is in need of money and is conflicted. Don Cheadle is an undercover cop who has a connection to drug dealer Wesley Snipes, and Ellen Barkin is Cheadle’s unpleasant boss. Given the previous history of criminal behavior and that of recent events in various police departments today, the idea that cops can’t really be this foul-mouthed and violent can be put to rest.
Directed by Antoine Fuqua.
Day 41 – The Double, 2011. At 62, Gere is still chasing suspects, jumping off walls, participating in high impact car chases, and looking debonaire in this flawed, spy thriller. As a former CIA agent recalled to duty for this caper, he collaborates with Martin Sheen as his FBI boss and Topher Grace as his fledgling know-it-all sidekick. Unfortunately, the identity of the killer is revealed almost at the beginning, thereby ending any notion of suspense — until the end.
Directed by Michael Brandt.
Day 42 – Arbitrage, 2012. This could be called the Ballad of the Haunted Hedge Fund Billionaire. Susan Sarandon repeats her role as the understanding, faithful wife (Shall We Dance), and someone who is actually Gere’s age, while he lusts after women the age of his daughter. Gere is an expert at capturing the repellent aspects of a character, and this is no exception. His character manipulates everyone, his wife, his daughter, his lover, and his business associates, all in the name of money. Gere captures his cunning and unpleasant qualities, yet somehow making himself sympathetic as well.
Directed by Nicholas Jarecki. RECOMMEND.
Day 43 – Time Out of Mind, 2014. This is another formidable acting effort and a real departure from his usual roles. There is no proselytizing here, but Gere’s insight into failure is demonstrated. Through an almost silent affect, Gere is able to convey the fear, mental instability, loneliness, and self-loathing of a homeless man in New York. He dominates the movie in a compelling way as he lives his quiet life observing, looking into windows, seeing reflections, and listening to conversations. Ben Vereen as his manic friend and Jena Malone as his daughter are perfect. MUSIC NOTE: Gere wrote and performed the song, Time Out of Mind, on the piano. Time Out of Mind was also the name of a ’97 Dylan album. LANGUAGE NOTE: I had only a vague notion of what the expression “time out of mind” meant. It means “time immemorial.”
Directed by Oren Moverman. RECOMMEND.
Day 44 – The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, 2015. I am sure that all the actors had a great time hanging out together in Jaipur — Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Ronald Pickup, Celia Imrie, Penelope Wilton et al. — but I would recommend fast forwarding to the end to watch the Bollywood song and dance finale. Even Dev Patel is less insufferable in this scene because he is singing, not talking. Gere wanders in — urbane and silver fox-like as usual — to move the plot forward, such as it is, and to seduce Patel’s grumpy mother. Stick with The First Best Exotic Marigold Hotel if you must.
Directed by John Madden.
Day 45 – The Benefactor, 2015. Gere has an affinity for manic, unpleasant, sometimes sociopathic characters (Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Breathless, Mr. Jones, Internal Affairs, to name a few), and here he turns on the acting wattage. Winning and domination give meaning to the life of a sociopath, but that’s only part of Gere’s problem. He’s a wealthy, morphine-addicted philanthropist with an unspecified mental disorder, who is trying to manipulate and bend a young couple to his will (Dakota Fanning and Theo James). He starts out looking like a bohemian Old Testament prophet with long white hair and beard, arty scarves and checkered jackets, but cleans up progressively as the movie ensues. Is there a correlation between facial hair and sanity? He’s exasperating, unsympathetic, charmless, and malevolent, an emotional naif, but unfortunately, this flawed character study doesn’t go far enough. You know little about his life except for the life-defining incident that crippled him. As odious a character as he is, you can’t stop watching him. MUSIC NOTE: Gere sings the opening to My Girl by the Temptations.
Directed by Andrew Renzi. RECOMMEND.
Day 46 – Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer, 2016. A farce in four acts and a master class in acting, Gere gives a stellar performance as an annoying, pathetic, cunning yet inept, and vulnerable man, not really a fixer by definition, but more of a con man. This portrait of a lonely, frequently unlikeable, morally conflicted man captures the tension between intention and execution, as even his most embarrassing and incompetent attempts at negotiating and fixing invoke sympathy. Lior Ashkenazi, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Michael Sheen, and Steve Buscemi are the support team in Norman’s search for relevance.
Directed by Joseph Cedar. RECOMMEND.
Day 47 – The Dinner, 2017. Adapted from Herman Koch’s excellent 2009 book with its searing commentary on modern ambiguity, this film uses personal and scene disconnection in a jarring but effective way — the characters are forever getting up from the table to go outside to have a
smoke, have an argument, or make a phone call. Two couples are gathered together at a depressingly chic restaurant: Gere is a politician running for governor and is with his dissatisfied, younger wife (Rebecca Hall). His brother, Steve Coogan plays an unfiltered, jealous, mentally disturbed, obnoxious history teacher, and the complicated Laura Linney is his wife. The ethical dilemma, precipitated by a horrific event, is one you might abstractly discuss with friends at dinner, but in this case involves their children They are living the dilemma, and only one of them knows the right thing to do. All four actors play their roles to the hilt, although Coogan’s character is very hard to take. Gere, in an understated performance, expresses the frustration, love, and controlling inclinations of the character perfectly.
Directed by Oren Moverman. RECOMMEND.
Day 48 – Three Christs, 2017. In Dr. Milton Rokeach’s book, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, a study of schizophrenia in the late ’50s, he says his three male patients who thought they were Christ cured him of his “God-like delusion” that he could cure them. The movie attempts to simplify the topic of schizophrenia in general, and the scope of the project in specific, and to present it for public consumption. Gere is the empathetic psychiatrist, Charlotte Hope is his research assistant, and Julianna Margulies is his wife. Peter Dingklage, Walton Goggins and Bradley Whitford, the three Christs, are formidable as different versions of their unique perception. They are the core of this movie, and their actions are central and personal to the movie. In a less enlightened time where elctro-shock therapy and lobotomies were standard procedure, these three participants in an experimental group therapy were in the vanguard.
Directed by Jon Avnet. RECOMMEND.
Day 49 – MotherFatherSon, 2019. In this eight episode BBC series, Gere gives a sterling performance in a long delayed venture back into television. Gere, now 70, is an American Rupert Murdoch-like press tycoon who has a divorced, younger wife, Helen McCrory, (a much younger, pregnant wife, Elena Anaya), and a disappointing son, Billy Howle. Gere plays this familiar role with gusto. Harsh and ruthless, the product of his father’s abusive and unloving upbringing, his true feelings for both son and ex-wife are always tempered by what is advantageous for him. There are some memorable scenes and images — an extremely sad and bizarre sex scene and a surreal underwater attempted suicide/sex scene, a telling scene with Gere as a boy and his father, the soulless, stark modern apartment that Howle lives in, the storm trooper-like crowds at the candidate’s rallies — along with many realistic verbal clashes and a challenging and complicated plot line. There is a remarkable cast: Gere’s assistant, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Sarah Lancashire as the dangerous, Trump-like but smart and articulate candidate (“I want my country back,” and “I’m not a politician.”), Jahan Zakari as the Prime Minister, Joseph Mawle as McCrory’s lover, and Paul Ready and Sinead Cusack as the intrepid reporters among others. This melodrama has some loose ends and questionable inconsistencies, and perhaps too many side stories, but the series is addictive and thought provoking. Given the current dsytopian reality of our daily lives, it is prophetic.
Directed by James Kent and Charles Sturridge. RECOMMEND.
Alas, my Richard Gere Film Festival has concluded,** but I am optimistic that more films will be forthcoming. As I traveled through his artistic life in a short period of time, my impressions were compressed but vivid. There were some creative dry patches, but a day is not a year, and I soldiered on to view many surprising and provocative movies. If you saw some of these movies 30 or more years ago, try watching them again from a different social perspective. You’ll find many of them still relevant, realistic, and controversial.
In a perfect world an actor chooses his roles because it mirrors something within himself that he wants to explore. If you are the kind of actor who can pick and choose his scripts (which Gere is), it is interesting to see what his choices have been. He generally gravitates toward complex characters who are ruthless, emotionally conflicted or disturbed psychiatric studies which are always touched with an element of vulnerability and vanity. You can’t plumb the inner depths of a character if you don’t have inner depths yourself.
Why, then, is Gere so captivating to watch? Although his features are somewhat imperfect, he radiates energy and sexuality. His body and face are expressive, his attitude is assured but sensitive. His seductive, controlled physical grace and sinuous movements always make him look as if he is moving to an inner musical beat. His ability to inhabit his roles is extraordinary, and his presence and innate joie de vivre are very appealing. As Gere has moved from beautiful youth to handsome middle age,and then on to distinguished old age, his acting continues to grow and his role choices have become more complicated, as we are all more complicated at the end of our lives than at the beginning. Although Gere’s good looks have taken him far, it is his consummate acting skill and intelligence that have rescued him over and over. As an actor, Gere is not in the shallow and uncontemplative category. His natural intelligence, Buddhist belief and activism on the part of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, and AIDS, have given him an alternate life and considerable gravitas.
This was such an enjoyable, diverting, and continuing project! Thanks, Julian Kaye, and cheers!
*Gere has made 52 screen movies, not including his involvement in 6 movies on Tibet and Buddhism, and a few long-ago intermittent TV gigs (most notably in And the Band Played On), and the recent BBC series, MotherFatherSon. Four movies were quite difficult to find although I did track them down eventually, even going so far as to buy a VCR so that I could play 2 movies only obtainable in VHS format. Three movies I found at Seattle’s famously encyclopedic Scarecrow Video. I did not watch his first two movies where he had small roles (Report to the Commissioner, ’75, and Baby Blue Marine, ’76), and chose not to watch a 2013 movie (Movie 43) and a 2014 animated movie (Henry and Me). One of the movies on Tibet I did watch was Journey From Zanskar, 2011. This is narrated by Gere and is a harrowing documentary about some intrepid monks who visit a remote town to bring some very poor, promising, young children to Manali for further education. It is a grueling trip with many hazards, but the idea is that they will eventually return to their homes and educate others. Zanskar was in Tibet until British partition placed it in Northern India, and is the last, undiluted bastion of Tibetan Buddhist society. Directed by Frederick Marx.
**One of the many side benefits of this movie watching experience has been my personal discovery of directors like Mike Figgis, Jim McBride, Terence Malick and Oren Moverman, actors like Delroy Lindo, Laurie Metcalf, Sinead Cusack, and Helen McCrory, and cinematographers like John A. Alonzo, Juan Ruiz Anchia, and Nestor Almendros. As a result of this network of tangled connections, I’m discovering new and interesting worlds.
Many thanks to my brother, John H., who proofread and reminded me of long-forgotten grammar rules.
-Ruth