Richard Gere, Dakota Fanning, Clarke Peters. Dir. Andrew Renzi, Samuel Goldwyn, 2015
When I lived in the SRO hotel-styled facility for mentally ill homeless people, we couldn't drink alcohol on-premises. They could not prevent a resident from sitting at Carl's tavern all day getting drunk, but they could, and did, search the drunk resident's backpack as he came in ten minutes after the beer store closed. Obviously, illegal drugs were illegal, which doesn't mean a fair amount of weed and crack were not smoked in those sleeping rooms. They were. I smoked some of it. The staff patrolled the halls of the upper floors, however, pausing to sniff, to listen, authorized to key-in to a room if they suspected - almost anything. I smoked stuff in my rooms, others smoked in theirs, but the risk was sufficient I ended up walking around the block smoking a joint about as often as blazing up inside.
My god, I'm off track. Because we couldn't safely imbibe/ingest/inhale in our rooms, many of us frequented the apartment of John and Kinzie, former residents who moved right across the street. They kept an open-door policy, until Daniel began coming by. Daniel, by his own lights, had once been something of a Scene Queen, emphasis on 'queen,' a bon vivant, and hardcore hedonist. He certainly gobbled and swilled things with orgiastic abandon. Daniel wanted to host parties at the first of each month when his money came in, from John and Kinzie's apartment. He would appear late-morning, swooping in, taking the best chair in the room, smiling fondly at us.
"We're going to have a party. John, here, take $50 and walk up to the liquor store and get us a handle, no, two handles of vodka."
"Um, Dan-"
"And then on the way back stop at the beer store and get at least three 40s of that beer you like with the change from the liquor store."
"Um, Dan, I-"
"Now, Russell, you can get us good weed? In some quantity?"
"I mean, I can go to the corner and see if my guy's there yet and he'd hook me up with a legit quarter, but-"
"I'm sure that will be fine. Here's some money. Now, Kinzie, how many of your lovely klinopins do you want to sell me?"
Daniel drove everyone nuts, but he meant well, in his pompous way. In either his mind or real time he had once been the life of parties, the belle of the ball, and he assumed he could simply buy and intoxicate us into returning him, if only briefly, to those days. He had a sad sweetness to him, but one day John finally had to tell him not to come back.
Give Daniel a billion dollars, his own hospital, a puppetmaster-complex, a morphine habit, and no boundaries, and you'd get Richard Gere's Franny in Andrew Renzi's monumentally strange The Benefactor. Franny has founded a first-class children's hospital, to be run by his best friend, Bobby. Franny and Bobby and his wife have a close friendship, unusually so, and he dotes on their 17 year-old daughter, Olivia (Dakota Fanning.) Out for a drive with the couple to smoke a joint, their Volvo is blindsided by a big red truck, in a great jump-scare. Gere'a behavior in the seconds leading up to the collision may not cause it, but Bobby (Dylan Baker) is distracted at the moment of impact.
Five years later, haunted by the tragedy, Franny lives out of luxury hotel suites, addicted to morphine, when Olivia re-enters his life, now pregnant and newly married to a young doctor, Luke. Like the old joke about opening up a little and learning way too much in return, Franny takes Olivia's reappearance as his cue to move into and begin arranging their lives, buying them the house where Olivia grew up, and paying off all Luke's med school debt. From there, things happen.
Nothing gory or splattery or demonic or conspiracy-themed. No car chases or deranged gunfights occur. I thought it looked like that kind of thing when I grabbed The Benefactor and, while I was way off base, what ensues is magnificently uncomfortable. Watching Gere play a man with no conception of personal space or autonomy, who tries to replicate his off-kilter relationship with Olivia's parents with Olivia and Luke, instead, made me squirm and writhe and moan, "Oh, you didn't do- ohhhhh goddd, you did" aloud, often. When it turns out all his beneficence has served setting up his expectations of a transactional relationship when his morphine 'scripts run out, he becomes even more pathetic and more creepy. Let me be clear - in the best possible movie-way, Gere plays King Creep-O in The Benefactor. Whatever its issues, and it has a few, it's worth seeing just for Gere's performance.
Our errant friend Daniel could be unintentionally boorish, overbearing, but he also had a quality of a lost child, always trying to recreate his golden past, as if he weren't 63, overweight, and diabetic. I understood that about him, even as he got up my ass, and I related to it much more than I wanted to. Only in the last couple years has it occurred to me that my belief life peaked at 14 is one huge lie I convinced myself, and others, was true, and milked for all it's worth. Watching Franny's childishness, his lack of boundaries, and melodramatic interpretation of his own life turn out to mostly be about his own addictive narcissism bugged me.
Moreso perhaps than most. The Benefactor holds a 25% on Rotten Tomatoes, a 34 on Metacritic. As much as I want to say I discovered two movies this time, The Beast and The Benefactor, I'm not 100% that others will find the action here as resonant as I. Which could be a problem, because none of those genre conventions I mentioned does occur, and the moment where Franny becomes a complete monster and drives them away forever, or the moment when Franny goes too far and endangers the foetus' life and he's exiled forever - the climactic moment The Benefactor appears to be headed for never really arrives. Indeed, he goes from persona non grata to redemption in about five minutes in an ending that feels pasted-on. Fanning is good as a woman realizing whatever relationship she had with Franny once can't be replicated, and shouldn't be. Theo James, of the Divergent franchise, isn't amazing but does what the screenplay asks, get increasingly freaked out and pissed off, well enough. Clarke Peters, of both The Wire and Treme, has lines in more than one scene and is thus mentioned in the cast list but impacts the story in no real way.
The Benefactor may be one of two legit discoveries in this haul, and it may just be a so-so suspense drama with Gere being awesomely strange that resonated with me more than it would most. It's tough to say for sure, so I guess that makes it my favorite kind of movie to write about. Have your own experience. Find out how much our mileage varied. I think it polished off two slow Thursday hours well enough to give a nod. See if you agree.
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