“I’m just a fuck up, and I need to sleep.” Last week, The Benefactor gave us Richard Gere as a millionaire philanthropist with homes to give away. This week, this 2014 movies finds him on altogether more convincing ground as an itinerant New Yorker who wakes up in a bath, gets thrown out onto the street, and gradually comes to the awful realisation that he is homeless. Wandering through the hospitals and homeless shelters of NYC, Gere’s George is consistently spied at a distance, cinematographer Bobby Bukowski’s long lenses viewing him through bars, through windows, across crowded streets, engulfed by his environment. Meanwhile, co-writer/director Oren Moverman (The Messenger, Rampart) and his sound team build up a heavily layered montage of other people talking, laughing, shouting, screaming and singing, a cacophony in which George is habitually all but silent. Ben Vereen is excellent as George’s verbose streetwise sidekick Dixon (“will you please just stop talking”), and Jena Malone downplays it as the barkeep daughter worn down by her wretched father’s failings. You’ll share George’s sense of weariness as he searches for a simple night’s sleep, but more importantly you’ll believe in the cold world he inhabits, and the complex plight of those around him.
