Recensioni de* critic*

Far from being a mere gimmick, this is Moverman's attempt to frame his hero as a person who we only see across a divide or through some kind of social partition. It lends the film an air of realism and light tragedy, as well as some much needed objectivity. This is a portrait of life below the margins that emphasises the day-to-day struggle, but always imbues George with dignity and a certain scruffy grace.

Oren Moverman's examination of the plight of the homeless doesn't exactly say anything new, but its lyrical sensibility and hypnotic rhythms make a powerful statement about what it's like to live on the blurry edge of society's field of vision... This is a tough watch, but its humanity and empathy stay in the mind after the grit and grime have washed away.

The gentleness here feels studied, but it seems like Moverman might be better off as a director who likes to gamble on emotional and actorly excess. The opening scenes of The Messenger, in which Foster and Harrelson stand by as families grieve and rage, do something powerful with that excess. Here the risk appears to be putting someone as famous as Gere alone on the streets.

In Time Out of Mind, Moverman's experiments are wearying—they deplete your emotions rather than rouse your empathy. You feel spent before the film is halfway over. For the most part, the auteur's visual strategy just pounds home the protagonist's disconnectedness and deterioration.

Gere is extraordinary here, and it says something about his disciplined, inward-facing performance, and about the movie's subtle visual strategies, that he's in almost every frame of Time Out of Mind, but only rarely at the center of it. Moverman shoots Gere in very long shots through wire fences and glass doors and windows, down hallways, up and down the streets he roams aimlessly, into the shelter where he retires to bed down for the night.

Moverman's strained effort to squeeze George's activities into a series of plotlines is matched by an arch and portentous visual style. Filming through doors and windows with off-balance framings and eerie reflections, the director suggests a world and a life out of whack.

With his latest drama, Moverman wants to place the viewer firmly in George's shoes. Long, roving zooms reminiscent of Robert Altman expand and condense the frame. New York City provides a relentless chatter of voices and machines that fade in and out. This intricately layered sound design becomes a deafening reminder of the world's uncaring and fast pace. Moverman's idiosyncratic camera placement reminds of Hou Hsiao-hsien's languishing visual approach.

For all its formalist qualities, the film still has a very visceral, elemental kick. Moverman eschews context, but he gives us experience instead... Time Out of Mind takes what could have been a standard social issue drama and turns it into poignant, anguished art. It shows us a man in free-fall, and for a while, it lets us fall with him.

It's set in harsh reality and shot with a simplicity and directness that demands the viewer's full attention. And it is built around a lead performance by Richard Gere that immediately draws the viewer in through familiarity (or star power) but then increasingly demands that we engage with the character on his own terms, and forget whatever we think we know about the actor.

Gere's performance is movingly understated, as in a scene where George panhandles with a knit hat pulled down to his brows, his handsome face unrecognizable but his jitteriness and blank desperation utterly convincing... Time Out of Mind asks viewers to consider George's situation both from his point of view and a seemingly unbridgeable remove—a knotty but worthwhile challenge.

I appreciate that, with this and Rampart, Oren has gone fully existential and experiential. (The Messenger made overtures in that direction.) What wisp of a plot there is concerns Gere's strained relationship with his daughter (Jena Malone), and I like how Oren "resolves" it by having the child walk in the shadow of the parent, always at a distance, the bridge never quite mended.

I was impressed by this film – and especially its soundscape, which presents New York as an aural fabric of self-involved lives overheard – but I also found it to be weak at the very point that Timbuktu and Two Days, One Night were strong: at the point of connection between the individual life and the lives surrounding it.