Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
Starring Richard Gere. Rated PG

Generally speaking, a fixer is someone who puts things or people together quietly behind the scenes. In this case, the fixer is in every scene, because Richard Gere is the prime mover as Norman Oppenheimer, a free-range opportunist—one might say schnorrer, in Yiddish—who just wants to make everyone happy.

Norman is the English-language debut for Joseph Cedar, a New York–born Israeli writer-director responsible for 2011’s excellent Footnote, about battling father-and-son scholars. The son there was played by Lior Ashkenazi, a handsomer Steve Carrell who here is the much slicker Micha Eshel, an Israeli politician whom Norman befriends on his way to rounding up potential contacts for—well, who knows what, exactly. One act of unusually expensive generosity carries Norman skyward on the business ladder when Eshel climbs higher. “And once you’re up,” Eshel tells his new friend early on, “you can never settle for anything less.”

An American-Israeli coproduction, the movie packs a lot of intrigue into two hours, as well as an army of incidental Manhattanites. Among others, there’s Norman’s timid banker nephew (Michael Sheen), a big-shot financier (Josh Charles) and his gatekeeper (Dan Stevens), and a local rabbi who looks to Norman for help. Charles aside, that’s a whole lotta goys going Jewish all of a sudden. There’s also Charlotte Gainsbourg as a Swiss-Israeli lawyer to whom Norman rather inexplicably spills a number of beans, setting off chain reactions most viewers will see coming far in advance.

Cedar is good at throwing a lot of balls in the air, although he complicates the juggling with montages that last too long, suffocating close-ups, and production tricks intended to make the images more exciting. They don’t. The filmmaker already had a big advantage. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Gere isn’t afraid to look and act his age. He turns in a commanding performance, even if he seems to be channelling Woody Allen at times. The too-neat ending doesn’t quite work, either, but you are left with a memorable portrait of a scrounge who finally finds his place in the world.