Even diehard Richard Gere completists will find their patience sorely tested by this sponge-pudding drama (originally entitled Franny) about a Philadelphia philanthropist with a hidden dark side, and his increasingly creepy relationship with Dakota Fanning’s “Poodles”, for whose parents’ death he feels responsible. Writer-director Andrew Renzi has cited the eccentric millionaire John du Pont as the inspiration for Franny’s character, but it’s hard to find any connection between the choking, privileged isolation that Steve Carell brilliantly essayed in the gripping Foxcatcher with the shambling Jerry Garcia figure that Gere cuts in this infuriatingly unfocused movie.
At best, The Benefactor has flashes of the madness of 1993’s Mr Jones, the severely compromised Mike Figgis film in which Gere played a charismatic manic-depressive. But as the narrative shifts from personal demons to drug dependence, so The Benefactor loses whatever anarchic spark it may have had, leaving us with an increasingly empty symphony of its star’s repertoire of heavy breathing, blinking and out-of-context laughing.
