A description of Time Out of Mind, a largely plotless portrait of a homeless drifter, reads like the recipe for the modern-day equivalent of Stanley Kramer's socially "important" but instantly dated movies. The protagonist, George, played by Richard Gere, wakes up in the bathtub of a Queens apartment crying out for a woman named Sheila. She has apparently been evicted, leaving him nowhere to go. Living on the streets, he becomes more and more desperate: He winds up hanging out at the emergency room at Bellevue Hospital, then enters a homeless shelter. But he can't handle its bureaucracy, although life there becomes a little easier when he makes friends with a talkative man who claims he used to be a jazz musician (Ben Vereen).
From the deglamorized star turn to the problem-drama material, everything about the movie screams Oscar bait — in the abstract. It's the cinematic ingredients that make the difference. Writer-director Oren Moverman takes care to ground his film in the vivid details of New York street life, and more care went into the sound design of Time Out of Mind than any other U.S. film I've seen this year. The soundtrack is a cacophony of traffic, construction noises, people talking and music from passing radios. It never settles into a coherent pattern, yet George has to sleep in the middle of it. When he goes to a homeless shelter, the street noises are replaced by a different but equally jarring sonic backdrop: sick men's coughs.
The attentive sound goes a long way toward shoring up the film's credibility, not to mention its watchability. But if we ever got the sense the lead actor were begging for our pity or admiration, the project would be sunk. Time Out of Mind was a passion project for Gere, who produced as well as stars in it — without him, it might not have gotten made — but drastic movie-star glam-downs are always risky, especially since so many of Gere's iconic roles (think American Gigolo, Pretty Woman) trade on his looks.
Nevertheless, when Gere panhandles as George, he's not a matinee idol trying on a Halloween costume of poverty. He doesn't just seem empathetically homeless, he appears broke, hungry and desperate — and the pedestrians ignoring or recoiling from him look like real, everyday New Yorkers, not extras. Moverman often approaches Gere from a distance: In several key scenes, he films George through dirty windows, with images from the street reflected in the glass.
It says something about the social Darwinism of American urban life that the film that comes closest to accurately capturing it would be about a homeless man. Time Out of Mind, whose painterly cinematography (by Bobby Bukowski) employs smears and blurs of color, doesn't look like Italian neo-realism. Even so, certain plot threads — George's attempts to find his birth certificate so he can qualify for city services, his attempts to patch things up with his daughter Maggie (Jena Malone) — evoke narrative tropes from Vittorio de Sica's films. The movie avoids finding easy solutions for George's problems: Sex, friendship and family all fail him to one degree or another, although the last becomes an open possibility.
That said, just when when the film threatens to become a black/white buddy comedy, the shelter tears that relationship apart. Time Out of Mind avoids miserabilism, but it offers no illusions about the essential loneliness of George's condition — and the extreme tentativeness of the hope it holds out for him.
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