Life in the background

Richard Gere and Ben Vereen in "Time Out of Mind." Image courtesy IFC Films.

One of the major points “Time Out of Mind” makes during its two hours of shambling sadness is the road to survival while homeless isn't the same for everyone. Some might collect cans to recycle and earn just enough to get a few meals for the day; others will panhandle and search for warm places to stay on a cold night.

Survival is the key, and it's depicted as a quotidian quest for the derelicts in New York. Every day is a struggle to find what a person needs to survive, and it gets even harder for those mentally incapable of making the right decisions for themselves. They need help, and they're in a place where finding that help takes a lot of luck and a few kind people willing to take an extra step to offer assistance.

So is the case with Richard Gere's George in “Time Out of Mind.” He’s a dazed and confused man who has lived on the streets for a very long time and knows just enough to make it through the night. He'll sell a coat to a local tailor and pick up another from a lost-and-found bin, crash in the bathtub of an abandoned apartment, and ride the subway wherever it will take him to stay warm. He encounters a few people as he wanders through New York – characters played by Ben Vereen, Steve Buscemi, Kyra Sedgwick and Michael K. Williams – and follows his estranged daughter (Jena Malone) around town.

“Time Out of Mind” has the undercurrent of a plot without having a proper story to tell. The film captures Gere's George not in the midst of a life-altering event or even a guaranteed change in his station, but amid a short stretch where he navigates through bureaucratic red tape and the confusion that process brings. He's pretty well lost to it all as well, his head swimming in numbers he can't remember and names of people who may or may not exist at all.

So little happens in “Time Out of Mind” it becomes easy to miss the important pieces amid the quotidian events. Getting his proper paperwork completed is vital so he can get some government assistance, but it gets lost amid his wanderings through New York. His conversations with Vereen's Dixon – a chatty fellow who boasts he was once a very good jazz musician – are often about nothing, but offer the few moments when the audience learns how Gere lost his home and started living in the streets, along with why his relationship with his daughter is so strained.

And yet the viewer never really gets to know George, something that is a necessity given the filmmaking style used by director/screenwriter Oren Moverman. Moverman, who also wrote one of this summer's most interesting films, “Love & Mercy,” shoots Gere from afar, rarely zooming in on the man and his legendary good looks and keeping a rather surprising amount of distance between him and the audience. Many shots are also obscured, taken behind objects or through windows and set in a place where the character can't find them. The effect is a quasi-documentary feel, like a fictional version of a Frederick Wiseman film, although it isn't necessarily meant to invoke a documentary; rather, the camera angles and the heavy use of ambient sounds create the feeling that everything is happening around Gere's character. It is a bit of a cheap tactic – a means of emphasizing the idea of society setting aside the homeless and considering them fixtures of a city akin to a water fountain or traffic light – but the tool is subtle enough and doubles as a means of placing the viewer into George's confused world.

“Time Out of Mind” loses its sense of self at the end when it shifts the responsibility away from Gere and onto Malone, who hints at attempts in the past to help her father but is still portrayed as more heartless than she deserves. The final shot, too, compounds the issue, adding a dash of daddy issues to a product that really shouldn't employ such lazy Freudian tricks. But the film succeeds more often than not, and its smart enough to know that the difference between a good day or a bad day can amount to a warm place to sleep and a good-enough supper.

Review: Four out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: Unrated

Run time: 120 minutes

Genre: Drama

Ask Away

Target audience: Definitely independent film fans who might have heard of this one.

Take the whole family?: Nothing really kid friendly in this, or really anything that would entertain anyone younger than 17 regardless.

Theater or Netflix?: Netflix is fine, although you might have to wait for home viewing due to the paucity of theaters screening it.

How good is Richard Gere?: He does quite well in “Time Out of Mind.” Gere offers a quiet performance, keeping the man's anger at himself inward while mumbling apologies for transgressions large, small and nonexistent. His piercing good looks come into play as well, as it’s strange to think what could have happened to someone who looks like Gere to fall so far in life.

Watch this as well?: This might be a bit of a stretch, but “The Fisher King” depicts homelessness without devolving into the maudlin as well, plus it has one of Robin Williams' best performances. For a similar sense of melancholy, read James Baldwin's short story “Sonny's Blues.”