Time out of Mind is the second film of this year’s New York Film Festival to deal with New York City homeless, but is very different from Heaven Knows What; where the Safdie brother’s film is a stylized look at the never-ending drama of junkies trying to live an emotionally amplified lifestyle, Time out of Mind is rigorous in avoiding artificially created drama, instead giving a gently humanist documentary-style portrait of the daily struggles of one man in New York. Directed by Oren Moverman and starring a completely dedicated Richard Gere, Time out of Mind sometimes falters for its lack of drama or conventional plotting, but is also admirable in its conviction that showing an everyday fight for survival in an uncaring world is compelling in itself.
The first scenes of the film show George (Gere) being forced out of an apartment where he apparently had permission to sleep by a contractor (Steve Buscemi). The encounter sets the tone of the film, Buscemi is somewhat compassionate, but really he just wants to get his job done, and George is in the way. George faces little outright cruelty in the film, but pretty much everyone who deigns to make eye contact with him sees him as an obstacle, or worse, a black hole that they’re scared of getting sucked into.
From then on, George is a rootless wanderer in the city, trying to scrape by. The film literalizes the term ‘on the margins’ giving short clips of the conversations of people walking by George; usually these are the audio equivalent of litter on the street, but here they’re rendered tragic, as they’re the only glimpses of human interaction George experiences. The film visually plays with perspective and the first half of the film is constantly showing George through glass walls, visually set apart from a world of belonging.
The first half shows George trying to make it on his own, experiencing vagaries of living homeless such as how a hospital waiting room can be a refuge one night, but not the next, as a less compassionate attendant is on shift. Eventually, George seeks help at a shelter, where he must deal with a maddening bureaucracy, but where he also gains a measure of camaraderie with the other men. Against his best intentions, he gains a friend, Dixon (Ben Vereen), who is as talkative as George is taciturn. A former jazz musician, Dixon is more of an optimist and prefers to euphemize their situation, using words like “diminished,” where George insists on looking at it clear-eyed, even though it drives him to despair. George also tries throughout the film to reconnect with his daughter (Jena Malone), a young bartender who clearly doesn’t feel that George was there when she needed him and has little tenderness towards him.
Time out of Mind can be difficult to watch, due to the subject matter and lack of a traditional plot, and is likely the furthest thing from entertainment you’re likely to see from a major star. But while it’s not entertainment, it’s good journalism. Despite the fictional script, Gere and Moverman immersed themselves in the world of benches and shelters and persuasively captured the details. Hollywood films have their place, but so too do neo-realist style films that try to enlarge our perspective and sense of compassion, and Time out of Mind is such a film.
