LONGING (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Longing, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 6, 2024

Richard Gere helps to ground Longing as much as the actor can. His performance as a man who discovers he has a son, only to immediately learn that his 19-year-old child has died, is one of subdued regret. The performance is authentic in its quiet melancholy and restrained desperation, but the same cannot be said of the melodrama surrounding the actor in writer/director Savi Gabizon's movie.

This is a remake of the filmmaker's 2017 Israeli movie, and after learning that, the whole thing, from the minimal character development to the dialogue, feels like some kind of miscommunication in the process of translation. It's clunky in many ways but especially in the language, which often has the actors speaking in a manner that sounds unified in a bit too much formality.

Some of them, like Gere and momentary co-star Diane Kruger, overcome it, simply because they understand these characters and the emotional uncertainty driving them. Most of the rest of the cast, however, seems to struggle to find a similar level of honesty. It's not entirely their fault, of course, because Gabizon's screenplay throws a lot of sudden intensity and some strange ideas their way.

The initial setup is intriguing, at least. Gere's Daniel Bloch arrives at a restaurant in the middle of his busy workday—owning a factory and apparently being inordinately wealthy, for what it's worth—to meet with a former lover. She's Rachel (Suzanne Clément), who was with Daniel before his business success and moved to Canada from New York City after the couple ended their relationship. After some brief catching up, Rachel tells Daniel that she was pregnant when they broke up and that she had and raised their child without his knowledge.

There's an interesting beat here, before Rachel can work up the strength to tell Daniel that their son has died, in which Daniel takes a moment alone to call his attorney. Whatever Rachel or his son might want, it's something that can be fixed, but after learning that the son he never knew about was killed in a car accident, Daniel brushes off the lawyer's call. There's nothing about this situation that can be fixed—at least not in any of the ways to which Daniel is accustomed.

In a way, the rest of the story, which ultimately feels like a string of new conceits and assorted distractions, amounts to Daniel trying to find a way to fix almost two decades of absence from his son's life, now that that the young man is dead. The concept is sound, based on the very little we know about this character and Gere's own history of playing characters very much like Daniel over the course of his career. Daniel is a stuffy professional under the pressure of the kind of crisis that he has never had to face before, and his instant reaction to everything is to negotiate, to argue, or to organize some solution.

Take his interactions with the son's French literature teacher Alice (Kruger). The son was in love with her, to the point that he was expelled from school for painting an elicit poem on a wall on school grounds, so Daniel imagines some key to understand the child, whom he never saw or spoke to, exists in Alice. He presses her for information about the crush, how the teacher might have felt about the student, and how the son treated her.

At no point does Daniel question even the potential that his son's actions and behavior might have been wrong, despite learning that he was basically kicked out of the house, was dating a younger girl named Lillian (Jessica Clement), and died with two pounds of marijuana in the trunk of the car. He's holding on to some ideal of a child he never knew—one that might not have existed in the first place.

Again, that notion is sound, but it's not nearly enough, apparently, for Gabizon. The script introduces fascinating ideas only to dismiss them (that Rachel is ill, that Daniel was abused as a child, that the teacher exists as an important part of this story and possibly the son's death, that the son and a friend owe someone money, etc.), and it keeps adding complications, conflicts, and concepts that take the material in odd directions.

A fantasy of a giant, naked Alice riding a building for pleasure, for example, adds nothing but shock, since the character unceremoniously exits the story shortly after that. As for the eventual focus of the story, it involves a couple grieving their own child, who died by suicide a year prior, and setting up a marriage between the two in the afterlife. The talk about that arrangement is especially awkward—and not only because Gabizon can't decide whether to treat it seriously or as a joke. A similar clumsiness comes with a development about the son's younger girlfriend.

Through all of the occasional ups and multiple downs of Longing, Gere somehow gives a believable performance. That's quite the accomplishment given this material.

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