Time Out Of Mind (Oscar-nominated writer/director Oren Moverman's third feature) doesn't tell a character's story, but instead simply watches one. The story Moverman observes isn't made up of a plot per say, but rather of little episodes that anyone could go out and see any day -which when strung together, form the chronology of a man's life. That man's name is George, and he is homeless. Observed through windows and reflections, in the midst of crowds and often not central to the camera's focus, George isn't even easily identified as primary through much of his onscreen placement during the film. As though apart of a moving game of "Where's Waldo?" played out on the tapestry of lives that is New York City: his conversations are obstructed by the sounds of others, pedestrians encroach on the audience's view of him, and the honks of horns and sirens of the city never cease to interrupt the words he speaks.
Played by Richard Gere in a role that abandons his debonair persona to the degree that it's smile-inducing when a woman calls him "Handsome"; George is homeless, but in denial -preferring to think he's just going through a rough time. "Am I homeless?" he asks. "No, we're [just] reduced" his friend from the shelter replies. George acts as Moverman's mirror to the audience, a walking question asking, "How would you treat me?" Would you ask, "Hey, you alright? Wassamattah?" as Steve Buscemi's building super does? Or would you react in fear like the woman who sees him laying in the corner of a glass-enclosed ATM corridor? "There's a homeless man!" she loudly whispers to her phone before fumbling her purse. George even offers the fraught woman his help. Would you be tone-deaf to his circumstances? Indifferent to his plight? Like the social worker who cuts him off to answer his phone, nonchalantly saying "Let me take this" before muttering "...boyfriend troubles" as if his first-world relationship problem would endear him to a homeless man with a hunger problem. Would you find him a source of amusement (the punchline to a joke) like the boys who startle him awake, throwing his own boots at him while he sleeps? Or would you react to him with disgust as his own daughter does, telling him, "Stop feeling so sorry for yourself."?
Though in denial regarding his state of homelessness, it has bred in George a hopelessness, defeatism. "I'm a f*ck up!" he exclaims during his entry questionnaire to get into a shelter. He's lost his dignity, his care for what others think of him. Sitting on a park bench, he perceives something as funny and busts out laughing with no regard for the way his outburst reinforces spectators' notions of him as an archetype -a "crazy bum" cackling to himself in the park. To not only Gere's credit, but the whole cast's, no character ever exists wholly as a caricature though. From Ben Vereen's loud-mouthed hustler (whose early presence onscreen as an over-the-top stereotype is initially offensively irksome considering the film's intent to humanize the misunderstood) to Kyra Sedgwick's social butterfly of a "bag-lady", each actor eventually slowly imbues their character's impenetrable eccentricities with empathy-stirring humanity.
Littered with contemplative pauses and reflective interludes that leave the audience with little to contemplate and not much to reflect on, the film's meandering nature proves its downfall. Silent stretches pregnant with the weight of previous scenes allow an audience to digest a film-maker's message; but pauses preceded by scenes devoid of meat to be chewed, leave an audience hungry. Moverman clearly thought out each of his film's episodes: filming them in ways that demonstrate how New York's homeless have faded from people to become the city's wallpaper, inhabiting them with performances clothed in stereotypes to lull an audience into a sense of the familiar before stripping away those stock tropes to reveal humanity laid bare, and scripting them sparsely so homelessness isn't explained with words but experienced through the feature's expert sound design -a cacophony of chaos that acts as the accompanying soundtrack to street-life. Would that Moverman had injected the same intentionality into the string that holds those often poignant episodes together...
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