Kritiken

Gere's performance... is warm, aggravating, moving, and laugh-out-loud funny. Only an actor this lively and inherently charming would understand the perils of coming off as too lively and too ingratiating; every encounter Norman has feels a little off, his behavior always edging into too-muchness. Yet how beautifully and funnily Gere realizes the character's awkwardness! The longer you spend with Norman, the more you love him, the more you appreciate his generosity and curiosity.

The kind of scalpelled character study that strips away dignity along with each layer of artifice, Norman is an intriguing but uncomfortable watch... It's a light-footed shimmy of a performance from Gere, who connects us with an unexpected dignity in the soul of this professional parasite. However, the sophistication of Gere's work is slightly undermined by a chummy, jovial score that over-emphasises the wacky eccentricities of the characters on the screen.

Writer-director Joseph Cedar charts Norman's rise-and-fall arc with the attention to detail of a procedural.

Cedar plays Norman's story for tragedy but never develops his inner identity, his history, or his ideals; the protagonist and his drama remain anecdotal and superficial.

The tragedy stems from Richard Gere's superb portrayal of "a drowning man waving at an ocean liner"... and his unexpectedly moving friendship with the PM. Norman is less effective at tracing the political fallout of his many complex deals, chiefly because the image of the frantic Gere roving the streets like a caged animal with earbuds becomes static, even with Cedar's imaginative staging of conversations and Jun Miyake's jokey klezmer–meets–Curb Your Enthusiasm score.

The film's dry comedic sensibility has been compared to the Coen brothers, though it's less dark and absurd and more tense. The actual scheme that Norman sets up is very confusing to keep track of and somewhat anticlimactic, and unlike other notable sad-sack frameworks like "The King of Comedy," the character of Norman—despite a formidable performance from Gere—isn't fleshed out with sufficient pathos to make this tragicomedy as poignant as it could have been.

The film deftly negotiates this sphere of influence as both a diverting parable and caustic tale, situated within the milieu of New York Jewry—conspicuous to anyone involved (anyone who knows someone who knows someone), while utterly foreign to those unversed in the vernacular of acerbic kvetching.