Video review: "Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer"

Richard Gere is pushing 70, an age at which most movie stars who want to continue to working slide into supporting roles for younger thespians or move to TV/streaming shows. Not Gere. He continues to take starring roles in good films, showing again and again how underrated he has been as an actor.

They’re smaller films -- probably you’ve never seen many of them, or possibly even heard of them. But you gotta respect the guy for continuing to do quality work in the medium where he staked his ground.

In “Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer,” he plays a wannabe power broker who’s really a pathetic Willy Loman figure and doesn’t want to admit it to himself. He’s perpetually on the move, dropping names and spinning lies, wearing the same coat and hat like they’re part of his DNA.

Most Wall Street financiers and politicians dismiss Norman for what he is -- a hanger-on with no real influence or juice. Even his nephew (Michael Sheen), a rising lawyer, tries to gently bring him down to earth.

But then Norman gloms onto a promising young Israeli politician named Micha Eshel (Lior Ashkenazi), buying him a pair of shoes in a fancy men’s clothier and finally nailing that “in” he’s been searching for his whole life. When the younger man unexpectedly comes into power, Norman finds himself feted, but also his life of flimflam investigated.

Facing pressure from all sides -- including his synagogue, which insists he use his new mojo to secure millions to save their building -- Norman starts to collapse into the web of lies he’s been furiously spinning.

Written and directed by Joseph Cedar, “Norman” is a smart, tragic and surprisingly funny look at how ambition can consume everyone, the big fish and the small. And featuring an actor who refuses to go quietly into that good Netflix.

Bonus features are rather modest. There is “Norman: Making the Connection,” interviews with cast and crew from the red carpet premiere, and “An Evening with Norman,” an Q&A with Gere and Cedar.

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Review: "Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer"

"Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer" is the story of a flimflam man with his heart, if not his methods, in the right place.

We've seen movies before about consummate power players, the sort of slick “House of Cards” types who slide through the intersecting webs of politics and finance with ease, relying on their connections with big names to close the killer deal or bend the right ear.

Norman Oppenheimer is not one of those fellows, though he would desperately like to be.

Richard Gere gives another dazzling performance in the small indie films that have become his bread-and-butter during an impressive late-career surge. His Norman is a sort of everyman nebbish, a good Jew who trolls the waters of the titans of New York, following in their shadows and hoping to poke his nose into the light.

His nephew, a rising young lawyer played by Michael Shannon, tries to warn Norman that he's a guy flailing in the sea trying to get the attention of ocean liners and massive submarines. "But I'm a good swimmer," Norman counters.

Norman is at once incredibly audacious in his ability to worm his way in to see just about anyone, but Gere and writer/director Joseph Cedar also gift him with a tremendous amount of fear and doubt. He's a guy at retirement age without any accomplishments or enduring monuments.

Unlike Willy Loman, he doesn't even seem to have a home or a family to go back to, though he'll mention his deceased wife used to work for so-and-so if it gets him in the door, or his daughter just graduating from graduate school and getting a job at XYZ prestigious firm.

It's clear Norman lies prodigiously, so we amuse ourselves by trying to parse out what’s real, what’s not, and what’s a hybrid of each.

Clad perpetually in a yellow camel overcoat, cap and old-school earbud microphone for his never-ending phone calls, Norman is as much a type as an actual person. Indeed, the right-hand men and women to the giants talk about the need to keep “the Normans” of the world away from those they serve and protect.

In a lot of ways, he reminds me of the John Candy character from “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” He’s a hustler who’s always hustling, a genuinely warm people person who’ll gently grab your arm and nudge you the way he’d like you to go. Talking ears off his what he does, dropping names and invitations for introductions.

Norman’s manipulations are quite transparent, and it’s up to you to decide if you want to go along for the ride or give him the cold shoulder.

Either way, Norman reacts pretty much the same: more attempts to ingratiate. At several points during the movie people more or less tell him, ‘Stop talking to me and leave me alone right now,’ and Norman will comply for a second, then follow with the inevitable, “Yes, but…”

The contretemps of the plot I’ll leave you to discover. Suffice it to say they involve finding $14 million so his Hebrew congregation can keep its building, with Steve Buscemi as the rabbi with the patience of Job; a billionaire financier (Josh Charles) whom Norman wants to entice; a Wall Street trader (Dan Stevens) and his dad, more fish for Norma’s hook; Charlotte Gainsbourg as a mystery woman on a train forced to listen to Norman’s prattling; and Hank Azaria as a younger, slightly more pathetic version of Norman himself.

The biggest connection Norman makes is with Micha Eshel, a young Israeli politician played by Lior Ashkenazi in a charismatic, attention-grabbling performance. Norman sees him at a conference, follows him around afterward, finally summons the courage to talk to him, and together they go into one of those New York men’s clothing stores where each customer gets their own attendant, and all the price tags include a comma.

For literally the price of a pair of shoes -- granted, possibly the most expensive pair of shoes in the world -- Norman finally gets his “in” to the big time.

A tale of tragedy that’s also mightily funny and discerning, “Norman” is another feather in Richard Gere’s already considerably festooned cap.

Review: "The Dinner"

Not since “My Dinner with Andre” has a meal seemed so full of portents and human collateral.

“The Dinner,” an intimate drama from writer/director Oren Moverman (“The Messenger”), gathers two brothers and their wives at one of those ridiculous “food art” restaurants for an encounter heavy with familial secrets and strife. Old grudges will be picked over, resentments stoked and then cooled, political ambitions balanced upon the edge of a knife, the future of young lives quarreled over.

Quite literally, by the time the check comes, the guests’ lives will be changed.

It’s a terrific ensemble cast: Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Rebecca Hall. There’s no true main character, though Steve Coogan serves as the locus of events as Paul Lohman. He’s a former high school history teacher, a hyper-intelligent man who lives deeply inside his own mind, while struggling to relate to anyone on the outside.

Even as he’s interacting with other people -- usually awkwardly -- Coogan’s narration gives us a taste of the constant internal monologue spinning inside his brain, generally involving a mix of Civil War lore and a desperate nihilism about the fate of mankind.

Just about the only one who can reach him is his wife, Claire (Linney), a doctor who applies her great bedside manner to soothing her anxious, uppity mate. We watch her and admire the force of her presence, the beatific way she seems to calm everyone around her, the anchor amidst a sea of tumult.

Later, we’ll find reason to amend our opinion of her.

Gere is Stan Lohman, a Congressman who’s currently the favorite to win the governor’s chair. He’s got a major bill he’s sponsored on tap for a vote tomorrow, and his right-hand woman, Nina (Adepero Oduye), can’t fathom why he’s spending time on a family dinner at a critical juncture. Stan is a politician through-and-through, a clear line that runs through his personal and professional lives: a schmoozer, glad-hander and flimflam man.

But again: down the line, we’ll come to reassess this character.

Rebecca Hall plays Kate, Paul’s self-described “trophy wife,” a much younger and beautiful woman who lends him an air of sophistication and grace. She’s the sort of person people tend to dismiss, and she uses that to bend her environment to her taste.

Chloë Sevigny pops up in flashbacks as Stan’s previous wife, though whether they parted through death or divorce, we know not.

Speaking of flashbacks: there are a lot of them. Based on the novel by Dutch writer Herman Koch, “The Dinner” jumps backward and forward in time with great vigor, to the point we sometimes aren’t sure if what we’re watching came before or after the previous scene. A few changes in hairstyles are our only clue.

But it’s the emotional thread that matters.

Suffice it to say, there was great darkness in the past, and more has arrived on their collective doorstep. I don’t want to say too much, other than it involves their trio of sons: Michael (Charlie Plummer), Paul and Claire’s kid; and Stan’s boys, Rick (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), born to his previous wife, and Beau (Miles J. Harvey), an African-American boy they adopted.

As the dramaturgy unfolds, a parade of fetishized food dishes are presented to them by platoons of waiters, emceed by a host (Michael Chernus) who describes each plate with the overworked prose of a latter-day James Joyce.

(My God, people, it’s food: stick it in your mouth and chew. When you’re hungry again, repeat.)

For a film that’s mostly people sitting and talking, “The Dinner” has an urgent energy about it. We sense that this seemingly ordinary evening will end up as the most important night of their lives. It’s a meal, and a movie, that sizzles.

Review: "The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel"

"The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" lives up to its name, a pale shadow of its vivacious 2012 predecessor about silver-haired Brits finding new life at a dilapidated hotel in India.

Of course, the filmmakers meant the title as a clever play, as young Indian entrepreneur Sonny Kapoor (Dev Patel) aims to open a second hotel in the course of the (overly jumbled) story. But still, a movie sequel that seems to declare itself "second best" should at least gain points for honesty.

"The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" was a smart and lively dramedy from director John Madden ("Shakespeare in Love") and screenwriter Ol Parker, who return for the sequel. The basic gist was about English pensioners who find they can't afford a life of quiet ease in their home country, and decamp for the lavishly overpraised Exotic Marigold.

In the end the grimy little hotel got fixed up, as did the lives of the aging Westerners who came here expecting something, and found something quite else. All their storylines got tied up in nice little bows ... and would've stayed that way, except when your $10 million film grosses $137 million worldwide.

Sequels, unnecessary except on an accountant's ledger, become a foregone conclusion.

The main players all return, with new challenges or extensions of their old ones. Widow Evelyn (Judi Dench) is happy doing a little work for a clothing company, until they offer her a full-time job with a team to manage. Her heart's with Douglas (Bill Nighy), an amiable tour guide who split up with his wife at the end of the last movie. But in the classic quandary that befalls only movie characters, neither will simply admit their feelings until the right moment and swell of music comes along.

Persnickety spinster Muriel (Maggie Smith) is busy running the hotel with Sonny, who is soon to be wed to the lovely Sunaina (Tena Desae), if he can keep his jealousy toward an old friend and competitor in check long enough. Sonny wants to buy another nearby hotel and expand the Marigold business model ("Why not die here?"), and needs backing from an American hotel chain, for some reason.

Sonny is living in fear that the would-be partner has sent an evaluator to check out his establishment, and who should show up on his doorstep just in time but a fetching American named Guy (Richard Gere), who claims to be writing a novel by mostly has eyes for Sonny's mother (Lillete Dubey), for reasons that remain mysterious to her, and us.

"The man is so handsome, he has me urgently questioning my own sexuality!" Sonny exclaims, in a typical over-the-top bit of Indian bebop.

Other characters' troubles mostly concern matters of the heart, with former ladies man Norman (Ronald Pickup) worried that his lady friend is stepping out on him. And on-the-make Madge (Celia Imrie) has not one but two rich older Indian gentlemen ready to propose to her, yet seems to hold the most meaningful conversations with her humble driver.

"The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" is a pretty transparent attempt to capture lightning in a bottle twice. It's not a bad little flick, and with Dames Smith and Dench around there's no shortage of tart retorts and looks freighted with meaning.

But it's a retread that's tired out of the gate, a contrivance of characters we know will arrive at their fated destinations promptly at the two-hour mark. Predestined, that is, unless this one does well enough to demand a third-best iteration.

Reeling Backward: "Days of Heaven" (1978)

Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven" may just be one of the most gorgeous films ever made. Some also find it among the most confounding. I acknowledge both the beauty and the resentment.

It was only Malick's second feature film; its reception was such that he would not direct another movie for 20 years, through a consensual unspoken arrangement between himself and Hollywood. It was shot almost entirely in the "golden hour" between dusk and twilight -- actual only about 20 or 25 minutes per day, which must have been a logistical nightmare during production.

The cinematographer, Néstor Almendros, won an Oscar for his efforts, though he was losing his vision and had to leave when the production ran long, so Haskell Wexler actually shot at least half the footage used in the final film. "Days" also earned Academy Award nominations for sound, costumes and the lush musical score by Ennio Morricone, which employs a rather traditional orchestral arrangement of strings and wind instruments that the great Italian usually eschewed.

The look of the film is just mesmerizing. The great sea of wheat fields in 1916 Texas Panhandle (actually Canada) often whisper and whip around in the foreground, while the characters are far away and small to us. When Malick does go in closer, everything has a dreamy, slightly washed-out character of indistinctness.

We feel like we've wandered into a painting. Indeed, you could probably snip any single frame from the movie, blow it up, frame it and put it on a wall in a museum, and it would not look out of place.

The line between cinema and painting has sometimes blurred with a few artists, including Kurosawa and Malick. Malick is famously indecisive as a filmmaker, often re-shooting things many times over or entirely changing around a day's shooting schedule on a moment's notice. He spent nearly three years editing the movie, and finally stumbled upon the idea of having a minor character narrate the entire story, calling the actress back to record bumpkin-ish lines that were largely improvised.

(In fact, as Peter Biskind noted in his book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls," Richard Brooks was given a look at some of the footage from "Days of Heaven" to help him decide whether to cast Richard Gere in his movie, "Looking for Mr. Goodbar." That film went through pre-production, shooting, editing and post-production and was released into theaters while Malick tarried with his film.)

The three main characters remain very remote to the audience, and this is the main reason I think the film isn't nearly as engaging as it could be. Roger Ebert, in his Great Movie re-review of the film, argued that since the young girl Linda (Linda Manz) is the narrator, the audience is experiencing everything at her remove, so the people she's talking about are necessarily at arm's length. To me, that explains what the movie is trying to do but fails to justify the fact that it doesn't really work as a storytelling device.

The plot is pretty simple. A hot-headed young migrant work named Bill (Richard Gere) accidentally kills his boss with a shovel while working in a Chicago factory, so he flees with his girlfriend Abby (Brooke Adams) and sister Linda down south. To deflect attention from the fact that he and Abby are unmarried, they maintain the fiction that she is actually his other sister.

Given how they canoodle and romp during their their little down time at the farm where they end up, no one is really stupid enough to believe this. Although the rich young farmer (never named and played by Sam Shepard) who owns the spread is ensorceled by her. He offers to let her stay on during the off-season, and Bill overhears a doctor telling the farmer he has a year or less to live due to some mysterious illness. They hatch a scheme to marry Abby off to the farmer so she can inherit his rich 20,000 acres.

This goes well enough, except for two problems: Abby eventually comes to genuinely care for the quiet, decent man, and he manages to retain his vigorous health for the most part. Bill leaves in a huff, angry at himself for using the woman he loved so poorly. He later returns, and tragedy soon follows in his wake, some of it almost Biblical in aspect.

Everyone looks so impossibly young and fresh-faced. Adams had an ethereal beauty, with big eyes and a small downturned mouth, and seemed like she could belong to whatever era she was portraying. Shepard and Gere wear contemporary hairstyles parted in the middle, which I think was intentionally incongruous. Their smooth faces are contrasted with the foremen at the factory and on the farm, who serve as villains with their creased, pock-marked visages.

I loved watching "Days of Heaven," but in the sort of way one admires an arresting landscape. You never really tire of looking at it, but any meaning or narrative you must impose on it yourself. Paintings often tell a story, but only a tiny snippet of one. We must imagine what came before and after ourselves.

Bonus video review: "Hachi: A Dog's Tale"

"Hachi: A Dog's Tale" is something of a cautionary tale. Not the movie itself, which is a capable tear-jerker, but how the film's release was handled.

The drama starring Richard Gere, Joan Allen and Jason Alexander made the circuit of the film festivals, including headlining the Heartland Film Festival here in Indianapolis last fall. It had a name director, Lasse Hallström, and seemed to have all the tools for a decent mid-level theatrical run.

But the film never got a theater run. Dates in December were pushed back to January, and the next thing I heard it was scheduled for video release on March 9.

It's strange, and depressing, how worthy movies with name stars and filmmakers can get shunted aside to video, while a whole lot of drek makes it to theaters.

"Hachi" is an Americanized version of a Japanese story about an Akita dog who shows the greatest loyalty imaginable. After Parker (Gere), a middle-aged music professor, stumbles across the tiny pup lost at his train station, he takes him home for safekeeping and -- of course -- ends up bonding with him.

Parker's reluctant wife, wonderfully played by the great Joan Allen, eventually succumbs to the dog's charms.

But this is but the beginning of the story. Parker dies suddenly, and Hachi, who had been making the daily trek to meet his master at the train station where they met, keeps doing so. The years roll by, and every day the faithful canine goes to meet the human he loves, who will never come.

It's a touching, true story based on a dog in Tokyo in the 1920s, where a statue was eventually erected to celebrate the bond between man and dog.

Hallström constructs an unabashed tear-jerker, but the film is skillful enough in playing with our emotions that we begin to forget about the manipulation.

Perhaps reflecting the film's underwhelming arrival, video extras are exceedingly thin. They're limited to a single item: An 18-minute making-of documentary that tends to fall into the familiar pattern where everyone involved with the project talks about how great everyone else is.

Once, just once, I'd like to see cast and crew talk honestly about the unavoidable conflicts and flare-ups that occur in any collaborative creative process.

Movie: 3 stars
Extras: 1.5 stars

Video review: "Amelia"

Most people missed "Amelia," the Hilary Swank biopic of Amelia Earhart, including me. The film wasn't screened for Indianapolis critics, and it fell into that category of movies I wanted to see and meant to see, but just didn't get around to.

I have quite a strong aviation streak in my family -- my mother-in-law, father-in-law, brother-in-law are all licensed pilots, my wife stopped training a little short of her own, my father was in the Air Force and worked at an airport most of his career, and my nephew is taking lessons toward his license. So movies about fliers tend to interest me greatly.

Structurally, "Amelia" is very similar to "The Spirit of St. Louis," the excellent movie starring Jimmy Stewart as Charles Lindbergh. The fateful flight of their careers -- successful in Lindbergh's case, unsuccessful in Earhart's -- acts as the framing device, with flashbacks recounting the events of their life that led up to it.

Director Mira Nair ("The Namesake") and screenwriters Ronald Bass and Anna Hamilton Phelan (working from a couple of source books) are to be commended for an unflinching portrait of the hype behind the Amelia Earhart legend.

Although an accomplished pilot, she was hired by promoter George Putnam (Richard Gere) as a passenger for a publicity stunt. She sat in the back of a plane bought by a wealthy dilettante as two men piloted it across the Atlantic. She was called the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, but even she admitted her function was essentially that of "a sack of potatoes."

Later on Earhart undertook the flight again, this time solo, but there's no denying her career, or at least her role as a media darling, started off with a bit of showbiz fraud.

Swank portrays Earhart as an ambitious, independent woman who was willing to engage in flimflam -- speaking engagements, photo shoots, even endorsing her own line of clothes and luggage -- as long as it enabled to continue her passion for flying. Earhart always labeled herself a social worker who flew for fun, even though she had an historic impact on not only the feminist movement, but aviation history.

The movie is simply gorgeous to gaze upon -- Nair's shots of airplanes and the landscape passing beneath are practically worth the price of admission itself.

But the movie falls flat in other areas, particularly the portrayal of her relationship with Putnam, who would later become her husband. Nair and her screenwriters cut corners to focus on the flying. So we're left with a lot of scenes of Putnam staring forlornly into a radio transmitter, waiting for word that his wife has arrived safely.

Earhart's affair with Gene Vidal, who set up some of the earliest commercial flights, is given even shorter shrift. We never get a chance to see what they meant to each other, and the impact on her marriage is given the brush-off in a single scene in the couple's rose garden. Perhaps that's an ironic comment, as in "I never promised you a..."

The extent of the short-cutting is evident in the DVD extras. A bundle of deleted scenes reveals the character of Putnam's first wife, played by Virginia Madsen, whose role was completely cut out of the movie. I can only surmise that the filmmakers made a cynical decision to omit the fact that Earhart broke up their marriage in order to make the character seem more likable.

And what a blow for Madsen -- unknown actors get left on the cutting room floor all the time, but Oscar nominees?

Similarly, we learn that Earhart herself had a fiance, who bowed out when her career in the air took off.

The DVD also has a rather ordinary making-of documentary, and a featurette looking at the enduring legacy of Earhart. A nice addition is a number of original MovieTone newsreels about Earhart and her exploits. They help us see the cues Swank took in molding her performance, particularly the distinctive Midwestern accent of the Kansas native.

It's such a shame that such an unconventional historical figure received such a conventional film about her life.

Film: 2.5 stars
Extras: 2.5 stars