Peter J. Owens Award: Richard Gere: Time Out Of Mind

Join us and screen legend Richard Gere for an evening at the Castro Theatre, where the actor will be honored with the Festival’s Peter J. Owens Award and discuss his prolific career before screening his latest film, Time Out of Mind.

How to pass the time when you have nowhere to go? How to get identification when you have none to start with? Disheveled and red-faced, George Hammond (Richard Gere) wanders New York’s cold streets, facing these questions and, slowly, his past. In a finely nuanced, tour-de-force performance, Gere plays this lost, ragged man movingly against type, bringing a haunted humanity to a man estranged from the world. With gritty minimalism and a plot driven more by character and setting than narrative, writer/director Oren Moverman offers a sympathetic yet unsentimental look at homelessness in the city that never sleeps. Teaming up with cinematographer Bobby Bukowski for the third time, Moverman captures the solitude and dehumanization of life on the streets with obscured shots of Hammond through windows, reflections and distances. Dialogue is sparse; instead the cacophonic sounds and random chitchat of a bustling urban landscape further underscore Hammond’s Kafkaesque struggle to survive on the streets and penetrate the dense bureaucracy of social services. With this bare-bones neorealist drama, Moverman and Gere deliver a stirring glimpse into the lives of those on the margins. —Nick Rahaim