Isn’t it time films about homeless people started… | Little White Lies

Isn’t it time films about home­less peo­ple start­ed show­ing more compassion?

09 Mar 2016

Words by Rowan Righelato

Person wearing hooded jacket in snowy weather
Person wearing hooded jacket in snowy weather
Time Out of Mind, which sees Richard Gere sleep­ing rough, offers a refresh­ing­ly hon­est and sym­pa­thet­ic depic­tion of homelessness.

Tom Waits’ wheel­chair-­bound bum says it best in Ter­ry Gilliam’s The Fish­er King when he explains that home­less peo­ple func­tion in soci­ety as moral traf­fic lights,” the mere sight of them keep­ing nor­mal” peo­ple on the straight and nar­row. As ever with Gilliam, the mono­logue deliv­ered by this char­ac­ter is a scathing cri­tique of mod­ern soci­ety, but it also pro­vides a handy descrip­tion of on-screen rep­re­sen­ta­tions of homelessness.

Being home­less is one of our deep­est fears, so it’s per­haps under­stand­able that most of us would pre­fer not to engage with a des­ti­tute char­ac­ter. As a gen­er­al rule main­stream cin­e­ma tends to revert to cliché when telling sto­ries of social exclu­sion. More often than not, films fea­tur­ing home­less char­ac­ters rely on colour-tint­ed flash­back sequences to pro­vide a neat and tidy expla­na­tion for the protagonist’s cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. This lends an emo­tion­al dis­tance, afford­ing the view­er the lux­u­ry of being able to take stock and think, Well, that could nev­er hap­pen to me…’

Stereo­types abound in these films. Home­less pro­tag­o­nists can be divid­ed into three dis­tinct types: inher­ent­ly trag­ic char­ac­ters such as Jack Nicholson’s Fran­cis in 1987’s Iron­weed and the junkie cou­ple in 2014’s Shel­ter; dam­aged genius­es like Jamie Foxx’s clas­si­cal musi­cian in The Soloist from 2009; and the free­wheel­ing tramps of 1986’s Down and Out in Bev­er­ly Hills and the forth­com­ing Hamp­stead. The prob­lem with these depic­tions is that cin­e­ma has a ten­den­cy to imbue every­thing it depicts with a dust­ing of glam­our – as the Guardian crit­ic Stu­art Jef­fries observes: We might try to think about the gut­ter but we end up just look­ing at the [movie] stars.”

For film­mak­ers, then, to tru­ly place the view­er in the shoes of a home­less per­son requires the courage to use non-­tra­di­tion­al sto­ry­telling tech­niques. Oren Moverman’s Time Out of Mind, released in UK cin­e­mas last week, has vir­tu­al­ly noth­ing in com­mon with pre­vi­ous films fea­tur­ing char­ac­ter liv­ing in reduced cir­cum­stances’. The super­fi­cial melo­dra­ma of a film like Shel­ter is replaced by an insis­tence on the monot­o­ny and sta­sis of the home­less expe­ri­ence. Much of the nar­ra­tive is giv­en over to long takes of Richard Gere’s George sim­ply being still as the world car­ries on around him. Mover­man also eschews the mawk­ish edi­fi­ca­tion of the The Soloist. The rare moments of humour arise out of the char­ac­ters’ appar­ent­ly spon­ta­neous riff­ing with one anoth­er, and George’s attempts at charm, which includes a brief flir­ta­tion with a kind nurse, reveal the true depths of his desperation.

The rea­son for George’s sit­u­a­tion is only ever hint­ed at – indeed we are uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly plunged into his sto­ry, left to grasp at what­ev­er nar­ra­tive clues float past on the fast ­mov­ing tide of the New York streets. We meet George as he is wok­en from an awk­ward slum­ber in an emp­ty bath tub in an aban­doned apart­ment. Forced to leave, he has nowhere to go but the streets. From his look of con­fused res­ig­na­tion it’s clear that this is not an unfa­mil­iar occur­rence. There is lit­tle in the way of con­ven­tion­al back­sto­ry or expo­si­tion, and George essen­tial­ly remains a mys­tery for the first two thirds of the film.

Time Out of Mind is a film that con­scious­ly avoids con­de­scen­sion. The idea of a sin­gle trau­mat­ic event pro­vid­ing the cat­a­lyst for the character’s inabil­i­ty to func­tion in soci­ety is less impor­tant than sub­merg­ing the view­er in the exis­ten­tial symp­toms of home­less­ness. Mover­man and Gere have cre­at­ed an immer­sive expe­ri­ence that suc­ceeds in giv­ing us a taste of what author and crit­ic John Berg­er terms the frag­men­ta­tion” of home­less­ness in his 1984 book And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos’:

Orig­i­nal­ly home meant the cen­ter of the world­­not in a geo­graph­i­cal, but in an onto­log­i­cal sense. A home was estab­lished at the heart of the real.” In tra­di­tion­al soci­eties, every­thing that made sense of the world was real; the sur­round­ing chaos exist­ed and was threat­en­ing, but it was threat­en­ing because it was unre­al. With­out a home at the cen­ter of the real, one was not only shel­ter­less, but also lost in non­be­ing, in unre­al­i­ty. With­out a home every­thing was fragmentation.”

Visu­al­ly, Mover­man and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Bob­by Bukows­ki draw inspi­ra­tion from the work of New York pho­tog­ra­ph­er Saul Leit­er. Like Leiter’s pic­tures, the frame in Time Out of Mind is often lay­ered’, with George shot from afar through panes of weath­ered glass. These shots cre­ate a dis­tanc­ing effect that allow us to observe George from a voyeuris­tic van­tage point, while plac­ing him in a dis­or­dered com­po­si­tion that reflects his state of mind. The frag­men­ta­tion of the image man­i­fests his sense of con­fu­sion, of being adrift. In his insight­ful piece on Film Com­ment, Michael Sragow argues that, com­bined with the ellip­ti­cal nar­ra­tive, this aes­thet­ic approach makes the film feel like a patch­work quilt left in patch­es,” but accord­ing to Berger’s def­i­n­i­tion of home­less­ness, this col­lapse of com­po­si­tion is pre­cise­ly the point.

The sound design is even more pow­er­ful in evok­ing the splin­tered psy­chol­o­gy of a home­less exis­tence. George’s life on the streets is set to an inces­sant, oppres­sive cacoph­o­ny of­ traf­fic, indus­tri­al noise and pri­vate con­ver­sa­tion­al speech in some 20 dif­fer­ent lan­guages. This audi­to­ry assault imbues the world of the film with a ver­tig­i­nous, hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry feeling.

What real­ly makes Time Out of Mind unique in its treat­ment of home­less­ness as an issue, how­ev­er, is the com­pas­sion it strives to engen­der. By mak­ing the invis­i­ble vis­i­ble, Mover­man ensures that the very fab­ric of the film refutes George’s despair­ing lament: I’m nobody. I don’t exist.”

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