Comic political mystery that makes the most of Richard Gere
Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
15 cert, 118 min
Dir Joseph Cedar Starring Richard Gere, Lior Ashkenazi, Michael Sheen, Steve Buscemi, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Josh Charles
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 who is anyone. 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 a network of quid pro quo back-scratching.
It’s with this in mind that Norman finds himself offering to buy an eyewateringly expensive pair of shoes for a minor Israeli politician, Micha (Lior Ashkenazi), smelling out the man’s promise and possible influence with his keen nose. They’ve only just met, but he’s completely right: within three years, Micha is Israel’s prime minister, and Norman’s 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, Steve Buscemi’s long-suffering rabbi and Charlotte Gainsbourg’s exasperated Justice Dept official offers a lot of give-and-take pleasure, however the chips fall on each occasion.
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.