Norman is swimming as fast as he can
Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
(out of 4) Starring Richard Gere, Lior Ashkenazi, Steve Buscemi, Martin Sheen, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Dan Stevens. Written and directed by Joseph Cedar. Opens Friday at the Varsity. 118 minutes. 14A
Richard Gere delivers a bravura performance in his title role of a Duddy Kravitz-style hustler, especially in a wordless early sequence that speaks volumes about his character.
The pantomime occurs outside a pricey Manhattan shoe store. Gere’s Norman Oppenheimer, an influencer without influence, seeks to ingratiate himself to Micha Eshel (Lior Ashkenazi), a visiting Israeli deputy minister.
Norman sees Eshel eyeing a ridiculously expensive pair of shoes, too expensive even for a politician. Norman’s hand touches Eshel’s arm, then his shoulder, in a buddy-buddy gesture. Eshel must have these shoes. Norman will make it happen — consider it a “Welcome to New York” gift — even though Norman walks the streets because he can’t afford an office.
Three years later, Eshel has become Israel’s prime minister. He remembers his impromptu pal Norman — “He has a tremendous heart!” Eshel tells his skeptical wife — and boy, does Norman remember him.
Thus is set in motion the main story of this English-language debut by writer/director Joseph Cedar, a New York-born Israeli filmmaker. Fascinated by the foibles of humans, especially men, he can take the smallest gesture or incident and turn it into something momentous, as seen in his earlier film Footnote, a Cannes 2011 Palme d’Or contender that also featured Ashkenazi, playing the successful son of a jealous father.
Ashkenazi is superb here as a lonely politician susceptible to flattery and gifts. There are also grand supporting turns by Steve Buscemi as Norman’s doubtful yet hopeful rabbi, Michael Sheen as Norman’s connected but worried nephew, Dan Stevens as a caustic Wall Street operator and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a mysteriously motivated Israeli official.
The picture, though, belongs to Gere, who deserves to be remembered at awards time. His Norman is a fully realized character, a man who is not to be trusted but who is impossible to hate and may even have that great heart Eshel believes in.
Norman is a strangely withholding figure, almost always seen in a camel coat, tweet cap and plaid scarf, as he carefully assesses a situation behind wire frames. He’s an unknowable man, yet one whose vulnerability shows through and makes us feel for him. When the nephew observes that Norman is like a drowning man trying to flag the attention of an ocean liner, he replies, “But I’m a good swimmer!” We don’t want him to sink. Peter Howell This female take on body horror comes with multiple advance warnings of people fainting, throwing up and/or requiring paramedics during film festival screenings, including at TIFF 2016.
It’s a visceral thing, to be sure, as France’s Garance Marillier plays vegetarian Justine, a frosh student at a hazing-mad veterinary college who suddenly becomes a raging carnivore with all flesh being equally delectable. The faint of heart (and stomach) should consider themselves duly warned.
I must say, though, that I didn’t find it all that extreme, since writer/director Julia Ducournau references so many other horror films (and does it so well).
I was more impressed by the skill of the filmmaking, in this feature debut, which won Ducournau the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes last year.
Ably assisted by Marillier — and Ella Rumpf as Justine’s controlling sis — Ducournau captures the more quotidian dread of fitting into cliques, losing your virginity and living up to family expectations. What’s a little cannibalism when you’ve got all that to deal with? PH Like many 13-year-old boys, Spark is outwardly confident, inwardly awkward and itching to see the world. Except that Spark, voiced by Jace Norman, is a monkey and his world is a trash heap in space.
He’s lived there in exile since his parents were caught up in a blackhole disaster instigated by the evil Zhong (voiced by Alan C. Peterson, who recalls Tim Curry at his most campy). A series of events leads Spark on a quest to save what’s left of Planet Bana.
Toronto native Aaron Woodley has assembled an animated galaxy that has starbursts of fun — Patrick Stewart hams it up so much as a displaced military captain that he would fit right in as the entrée at Easter brunch. Other voices include Susan Sarandon as a wobbly voiced robot Bananny and Jessica Biel as Vix, a foxy soldier (no really, she’s an actual fox).
But the whole of this story seems a bit slapped together, like the flying garbage scow Spark steals to complete his mission. Think Zootopia goes to space, but with flatter jokes. Kathryn Laskaris Matthew McConaughey stars in this lightly fictionalized account of the 1993 Bre-X mining scandal that changed mining regulations in Canada.
With the story shifted to the late 1980s and the firm made American rather than Canadian, McConaughey plays Kenny Wells, a rumpled Nevada dude who inherited his father’s mineral prospecting firm but not his dad’s business sense or work ethic. Kenny does have the good sense to hire an experienced prospector, geologist Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramirez).
Together they decide to search for gold in the Indonesian jungle, believing a treasure trove of the precious metal is there for the taking.
The jungle will test them both, not to mention the film’s director, Stephen Gaghan ( Syriana), and screenwriters Patrick Massett and John Zinman, who aren’t sure whether they’re remaking The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The Wolf of Wall Street. They end up failing both influences, as Gold becomes more of a bronze.
Extras include a director’s commentary, a deleted sequence and making-of featurettes. PH Asghar Farhadi’s devastating drama, the recent Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, expertly measures the slow drip of human weakness.
The Iranian auteur employs Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman as a device to mirror some of the events in his film: screen protagonists Emad (Shahab Hosseini) and Rana (Taraneh Alidoosti) are a married couple playing Willy Loman and his wife, Linda, in a Tehran production of the classic stage tragedy of modern disillusionment.
The play is more touchstone than template. Farhadi’s metaphoric method, as with his previous Oscar winner, A Separation, and other films, is to comment on the universal through the investigation of a specific incident. In this instance, it’s an assault the film never fully explains, but explores by way of a revenge scenario that leaves few unscathed and all shaken — and not just by the brief earthquake that begins the tale.
The message of the movie is how quickly civility can slip, along with the ground that suddenly becomes unstable, before your very eyes.
Extras include a conversation with Asghar Farhadi. PH