Today’s career-height performance and great film of the year on Netflix Disk: NORMAN: THE MODERATE RISE AND TRAGIC FALL OF A NEW YORK FIXER (2017; Israeli/American), starring Richard Gere, with support from Michael Sheen, Steve Buscemi and Harris Yulin.
I would almost call it, THE TRAGEDY OF AN UNIMPORTANT MAN.
Norman Oppenheimer (Gere), is an outsider. He’s one of those people who hover around the rich and influential, currying favor, always trying to make connections, always hoping that one will allow him to make the great deal. He’s presentable enough, but everybody does seem to know him, but all of his important business calls are made in the street, and all of his deals are always just pending (and far bigger than he makes them out to be, when he tries to use them to leverage bigger deals, still.)
Comes the day when, following a minor Israeli bureaucrat around for blocks, he finally works up the nerve to talk to the guy, and schmoozes, and schmoozes, and schmoozes, and ingratiates himself, and so on, and they walk into a ritzy department store together, and is with the guy when he tries on a pair of shoes, and says, “You know what, I’ll pay for them,” The bureaucrat says, no, no, I could never, Oppenheimer (paling at the price), says, no, I absolutely will, and mostly to get rid of him, the Israeli walks out wearing the shoes, and Oppenheimer has a contact who will be next to useless to him.
Five years pass.
And that bureaucrat, now the newly-instated Prime Minister of Israel, spots the trembling Norman on a receiving line with plenty of press and many movers and shakers in attendance, and cries, “Norman! My old friend!”
This is not a good thing. Norman does not have the access he imagines. The Prime Minister is more compromised by his association with this nobody than he imagines.
This will hurt them both.
Norman is a fascinating character. He is clearly a man who has never amounted to anything, but who has always ached to be the arranger and “fixer” of the title, even if everybody he meets with any real power sees through him right away. We don’t see how he lives. We don’t see the family he references and might be lying about. We do see that his wardrobe, while well-kept, never seems to change. And we see that his current association with an important man is not good for either of them.
Gere has played many powerful men, many who radiate money and influence; see PRETTY WOMAN, CHICAGO, many others. As a young star, when he wasn’t playing for sexual magnetism, he was playing young men in the process of becoming powerful men. Here, he plays a powerless schmuck, whose desperation is all over his face, whose improvisations are an exercise in getting the people he’s harassing to just listen to him for five more minutes. The fear keeps flashing on his face. He speaks with this rhythms of Woody Allen, and if it is odd to hear Gere give the performance of a Woody Allen, it is also tremendously effective. If Allen played exactly this role in exactly this screenplay, it would be a given that his pretenses of being an important man would never fool anybody for five minutes. With Gere, you get that he might be able to temporarily fool the mighty (like the billionaire played by Harris Yulin, here) into thinking that he MIGHT be somebody. (Though that doesn’t last.)
It plays like a comedy, but is really a tragedy. And is some kind of capital-g Great film. You need to see it.
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