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

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.”