By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of Norman
and Chuck
Norman
The
young Richard Gere often seemed smug in his chiseled beauty, as if admiring a gilded
poster of himself. But the dream hunk had a slightly comical, humanizing
“flaw”: his rabbit-tooth smile. He has grown into that smile, into its dental
hints of playful character. The beauty has rusted, the talent has ripened, the
bunny smile endures. In maturity Gere has done excellent work in Dr. T and the Women, Chicago, The Hoax,
Arbitrage and Time Out of Mind.
Now
Norman – his best? Norman Oppenheimer
lives to schmooze and wheedle and juice deals. “You’re like a drowning man
waving at an ocean liner,” says a top-connection New Yorker, whom Norman uses
to worm into the high ranks of hustle. “But I’m a good swimmer,” answers Norman
in his nice, nudging way. He is always walking, talking, cell-phoning, offering
his card (“Oppenheimer Strategies”). He’s no crook, but big-deal people sense something
dubious and are puzzled by his glom-on presence. With small elements of Richard
Dreyfuss’s Duddy Kravitz, Robert De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin and Woody Allen’s
Zelig, Gere geared up for this most with his gabby con artist Clifford Irving
in The Hoax.
Norman’s
core family is gone. Surviving relatives avoid him as a dud, a wannabe macher. He seems to live in his big camel-hair
coat – we never see his dwelling space. Not to spill the beans here, but the plot
spring is Norman’s twisty effort to “play” a visiting Israeli politician (appealing,
entirely credible Lior Ashkenazi). This involves a pair of shoes – $1,200
shoes! They must have Astaire taps, because soon, against all odds, Norm is in
the big game.
Writer-director
Joseph Cedar (a New York-born Israeli) reveals a hip, insider angle of Jewish
Manhattan, Israeli-American relations, money in politics, the power hooks of
religion and family. Norman’s good but needy rabbi is amusingly played by Steve
Buscemi, and as a bigshot Harris Yulin gets off a great line: “Rabbi Blumenthal
is not my fucking problem!” Also
swell are Michael Sheen and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Jun
Miyako wrote a blithe score (jazz, klezmer). Cinematographer Yaron Scharf pulls
off visual marvels, pairing some scenes wittily. Fun but serious, the story has
a hungry, often pensive urgency. Gere is subtle, not a Woody Allen knockoff. For
all his guff and bluff, Norman is a mensch.
The aging hustler (his hair tries for boyish bangs) wants to join the action, maybe
even pull off a mitzvah (good deed),
and he doesn’t nag our empathy. Go ahead, love the guy. Give the rabbit a carrot.
Chuck
Definitely
not a film about Charles de Gaulle, Chuck
concerns boxer turned “entertainer” Chuck Wepner (Liev Schreiber). The “Bleeder
from Bayonne” (N.J.) had two big moments in the ’70s. He went almost a full 15
rounds against Muhammad Ali, and when the bloodied Wepner floored him, the
champ came back like a furious cyclone. Then Wepner saw himself as the inspiration
for Rocky Balboa, Sly Stallone’s iconic movie Palooka. He milked that, charming
and then irritating the actor (eventually there was a money settlement).
Philippe Falardeau’s movie is a vintage treasury of Jersey slob times: the old
tunes, the awful outfits, goombahs, bimbos, disco, coke addiction, broken
family life, even a bear Chuck faces in the ring. The KO punch that really hits,
harder than Ali, comes from his fed-up wife Phyliss: “You stink, Chuck.”
Chuck doesn’t stink. Enjoyably unpretentious, it avoids the glazed candy corn
of Rocky and the solemn, operatic heft
of Raging Bull. Schreiber, beefed-up,
plays Wepner as no brain, yet also no dummy. He’s a decently fallible guy
making a strange living. Not squeezing pathos, Schreiber is more credible as
this hard-hauler than he was as Orson Welles in RKO 481. The cast is a pack of sharp razors: Elisabeth Moss
(Phyliss), Naomi Watts (really razored as girlfriend Linda), Ron Perlman
(Chuck’s manager), Pooch Hall (Ali) and Michael Rapaport (Chuck’s brother – I’d
guess that Rapaport will, within ten years, be playing Donald Trump). There is
an overstated scene at a school, and one (not four) bows to Requiem for a Heavyweight would have
been enough. The fights (real and faked) are absorbing, and if you don’t root
for Chuck you’d better exit early. Go ahead, love the guy. Give the gorilla a banana.
SALAD (A List)
In
my opinion, Richard Gere’s Ten Finest
Roles so far:
Norman
Oppenheimer (Norman, 2017), Dr. T (Dr. T and the Women, 2000), Clifford
Irving (The Hoax, 2006), Billy Flynn
(Chicago, 2002), Jack Moore (Red Corner, 1997), Robert Miller (Arbitrage, 2012), Edward Lewis (Pretty Woman, 1990), Paul Shepherdson (The Double, 2011), Zack Mayo (An Officer and a Gentleman, 1982), Dixie
Dwyer (The Cotton Club, 1984).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Like
Marlon Brando, 21, dazzling Tennessee Williams with his solo read-through of A Streetcar Named Desire (after fixing
Williams’s beach cottage toilet!), Orson Welles at 19 stunned author Archibald
MacLeish with an un-prepped reading of the blank-verse play Panic: “MacLeish was skeptical about the
young actor (and then) Orson started with (the most) difficult scene: his
breakdown, the climax of the play … MacLeish stared in disbelief as Orson read
the lines, the actor’s voice revealed in all its ‘infinite delicacy and
brutally devastating power.’ (Next) Orson started over on page one, reading in
his mellifluous tones for the next hour and a half, speaking not only (his)
dialog but the lines of all the other two dozen roles and even the Greek
chorus. His few privileged listeners were spellbound.” Alas, Panic had topical appeal and a short
run. (Quote from Patrick McGilligan’s great Young
Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
No
movie haunts Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas
(1984) more deeply than one of my childhood favorites, John Ford’s The Searchers: “In 1956 The Searchers claimed me with Winton
Hoch’s first shot: a door opening on Monument Valley, the moment that
‘permeates all of Wenders’s films’ (Alexander Graf). Ethan (John Wayne) is,
like Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), a terse loner embedded in rage. Travis’s bid
for redemption is his son. Ethan must save himself by not killing his niece
(Natalie Wood), abducted by Indians. Lean, brooding Stanton was no Wayne, and
that icon could never have inhabited Travis, but as searchers they are
spiritual siblings.” (From the Harry Dean Stanton/ Paris, Texas chapter of my book Starlight
Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Richard
Gere and Renee Zellweger flash some vintage moxie in Chicago (Miramax, 2002; director Rob Marshall, cinematographer Dion
Beebe).
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