I got new eyes/Everything looks far away.” Then the swagger is gone, and Dylan once again wears his 56 years as he rasps, “There’s less and less to say. The Private Lives of Liza Minnelli (The Rainbow Ends Here) RS Recommends: 5 Devices You Need to Set Up Your Smart Home He eases out of the joint and conveys the delight of a convict who has just tunneled out into the daylight: “I’m crossing the street to get away from a mangy dog/Talkin’ to myself in a monologue/I think what I need might be a full-length leather coat/Somebody just asked me if I registered to vote.”
Desire cools as the singer realizes that he is in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong woman. The voice - conversational, playful, sensual - snakes over a shimmering blues-guitar riff and the chords of a distant Farfisa organ as it recounts a conversation at a restaurant with a woman, a knockout “with a pretty face and long, white, shiny legs.” The narrator and his female companion spar verbally, a comical exchange of clashing values and cryptic, coded messages. You know, the skinny kid with the hurricane hair and the inscrutable smirk who blasted business as usual in the teeth? That guy.Īs the 16-minute-long “Highlands” detours from its verse-chorus-verse path to an extended narrative bridge, the deadpan twang in Dylan’s voice becomes more pronounced, and his old sly glee can be glimpsed. While Gere is very good in “Time Out of Mind,” he doesn’t have the kind of character arc or bravura scene necessary to put over this very well-meaning drama - which is too often content to preach to the choir on an important social issue.There is a moment near the end of Bob Dylan‘s 41st album, Time Out of Mind, when the Dylan of 35 years ago reappears. It’s pretty shocking watching Gere’s character securing a quickie with a far-less-than-glamorous empty-bottle collector in a cardboard box some 35 years after “American Gigolo,” one of several films for which Gere deserved, but didn’t get an Oscar nomination. Even with stubble and facial bruises here, he still looks somewhat dashing in the increasingly shabby clothes that George hocks to buy cheap booze. Gere has always been a better actor than he’s given credit for - he was terrific as a crooked financier in “Arbitrage” (2012) - partly because of his stunning good looks. But their relationship is not really fleshed out in any satisfying way. She’s unwilling to extend herself beyond an occasional handout because of her own very real pain. The film’s sole and slender dramatic conflict is between George and the daughter (Jena Malone) he long ago abandoned because of a past family tragedy. He also has to deal with some hostility from the predominately black population.Īn exception to the latter is talkative veteran shelter-dweller Dixon (a superb Ben Vereen), the only person who gets George to open up even a little bit about his past. He’s quickly directed by a guard to one of the city’s huge homeless shelters, where his mental impairment makes him especially ill-equipped to deal with the bureaucratic rules and requests for information necessary to secure a bed and meals. Gere, who also produced, deserves props for ditching his eloquent, glamorous image to play a disheveled and taciturn character whose memory is so bad he can’t answer even the simplest questions about his path to the bottom.Įvicted in the opening scene from the latest in a long line of crash pads by an unsympathetic building super (Steve Buscemi), Gere’s George - a 60-something who hasn’t worked in years - is forced to avoid falling temperatures by spending a couple nights in the waiting room at Bellevue Hospital. You have to give writer-director Oren Moverman (“The Messenger”) credit for his spartan, semidocumentary approach, even if there just isn’t enough dramatic detail to justify the grueling two-hour running time. “Time Out of Mind,” starring erstwhile Hollywood hunk Richard Gere as a homeless Manhattan drunk, is perhaps this year’s timeliest film - as well as, unfortunately, one of the hardest to sit through.
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