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Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer review: Richard Gere's character study is a slippery pleasure

Richard Gere as Norman Oppenheimer
Richard Gere as Norman Oppenheimer

Dir: Joseph Cedar. Cast: Richard Gere, Lior Ashkenazi, Michael Sheen, Steve Buscemi, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Josh Charles. 15 cert, 118 mins

It’s time to pause and appreciate the late-career indie endeavours of Richard Gere – the Gere-shift, we might call it – as he presses on with a series of thoughtful, modestly budgeted character pieces, reliably set on the cold, hard, pragmatic streets of New York City. In the likes of The Hoax (2007), Arbitrage (2012) and the excellent Time Out of Mind (2014), Gere has thrived, even if audiences have been slower to chase him up in these roles than they ever were when trash was his staple diet.

Norman, which could be described as a lightly comic political fable, is the latest example, and like all of the above it sets about using Gere’s slipperiness, his air of evasion, as a dramatic starting point. He plays an omnipresent fellow called Norman Oppenheimer, a self-styled consultant who claims to be “very good friends” with just about everyone in the world of New York Jewry.

Press him on any of these associations and he’ll get vague, though he does have a nephew (Michael Sheen) who’s a Wall Street lawyer, and he possesses a remarkable facility for getting close to people, often engineering chance collisions on the street and pressing his card upon them.

He aims to set these contacts up with whatever they might need, and hopes they’ll remember him in the long term, expanding his access into an ever-busier network of quid pro quo back-scratching.

Richard Gere and Lior Ashkenazi
Richard Gere and Lior Ashkenazi

It’s with this in mind that Norman finds himself offering to buy an eye-wateringly expensive pair of Lanvin shoes for a minor Israeli politician called Micha Eshel (Lior Ashkenazi), smelling out the man’s promise and possible influence with his usual keen nose. They’ve only just met, but he’s completely right: within just three years, Micha is Israel’s Prime Minister, and Norman’s old favours start to look like a currency he can cash in with interest.

Making his English language debut here is writer-director Joseph Cedar, best-known for his back-to-back Israeli Oscar nominees Beaufort (2007) and Footnote (2011). His writing has a nice line in dry irony, and he isn’t afraid to hold scenes out of human curiosity: watching Norman try to ingratiate himself with Josh Charles’s suspicious politico, long-suffering Steve Buscemi as a neighbourhood rabbi, and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s exasperated Justice Dept official offers a lot of give-and-take pleasure, however the chips fall on each occasion.

Richard Gere and Michael Sheen
Richard Gere and Michael Sheen

Cedar might have built up a broader satirical thesis from all this wheeling and dealing, but he’s happy to let the film rest gently on Gere’s shoulders – these days, a pretty safe foundation. In his tan wool coat and cloth hat, breath cold and irregular, Norman bustles through the streets, ducking into stationery shops or deserted alleyways to conduct his business by phone, and putting up his see-through front of being that guy you always need to know.

No one has any idea where he lives, least of all us. And his wider motives, beyond being recognised, trusted, thanked and remembered for every alliance he’s hatched, are allowed to remain as elusive as whatever his origins might be. Perhaps it’s just that he’s lonely, and his tragedy is that no one cares.

Best films of 2017
Best films of 2017