With each passing day, and with each passing day, A semi-fiction and semi-documentary film in the same format with Richard Gere in the title role is actually able to surprise. Do not look at a rating that does not reach 6 points and if after the first 10-15 minutes you do not like the film, you should turn it off, because what happened on the screen at this time will continue in the future. But if you decide to watch the whole movie and the beginning hooked you, probably the whole picture will appeal.
Read before watching the interview Gere on his role in “Break on thoughtlessness”, and then decided that it is worth watching the film to see the new Richard. The actor accustomed the viewer and all his fans to the fact that he is a playboy, a favorite of women and in most of his roles a successful man of pleasant appearance. But the image of a vagrant named George wandering around Manhattan is an incredibly bold experiment, which Gere himself and director Oren Mooverman went on.
When you read the words of the actor regarding the film, and then watch what is happening on the screen, you realize that the experiment was successful and through this duet, the viewer clearly sees what everyone knows: a vagrant is an empty place. Such people are treated as an extra element of society, not noticing them next to you, looking away when you see such a person on the street. For the most part, the extras of New Yorkers who surrounded Richard Gere behaved the same way, simply passing a beggar, flowing around him from different sides like water passing around a stone. It is not important for them to see the face of the person in need of a handout, they try to quickly leave the zone of discomfort that the beggar creates with his petition and plunge into his world, hurrying to work, to lunch or to meet with his acquaintances or friends. I am sure that most people behave in the same way and I am no exception. Sometimes it happens to give alms, and another time you go and think: just gave one man, after 100 meters another, stop, and I myself will have money after all the handouts?
The film was probably shot with minimal financial investment, but again, this is an experiment in which the main character - a professional actor got used to the role of a vagrant and did it magnificently. In order to shoot such a project, a camera and the main character are enough. Everything else will be done by the environment. At first it was necessary to delve into the meaning of phrases sounding from somewhere from behind the camera, but later it became clear that Oren Mooverman deliberately used scraps of conversations of passers-by rushing past homeless George. Thus, the viewer plunged into the world in which the character of Gere existed, shrouded in an unfriendly and indifferent environment towards him.
“A break on thoughtlessness” tells about the conditions in which such people have to survive. They don't care in the first place. What they eat, they care where they spend the next night. The issue of filling the stomach is also important, but secondary in this aspect.
What struck me the most was how much you can change a person by crushing his hair, dressing in dilapidated clothes and decorating his face with bristles! Richard Gere - yesterday's handsome from "Pretty Woman", "Escaped Bride" and "Doctor T" performed in a completely atypical role for himself and this viewer is quite capable of knocking off the rut! A cardinal change of image, there is no former self-confidence and even more so lack of integrity, and this was replaced by impotence, detachment from the outside world and the inability to realize and accept their own unenviable position. This is especially evident when the camera shoots Richard Gere from afar, capturing people rushing from everywhere on their business, and it is at such moments that people’s voices appear instead of musical accompaniment.
I think that everyone who watches the film will find something useful in it, will consider what he will like, which will hook emotionally. The film “Break on thoughtlessness” is a movie with meaning, without any templates, clichés or pretended luscious snot, in which the characters are smeared, rising from the very bottom and following the cherished American dream. The film is sad, in many ways tragic, cruel, but true, real.
But look at you. I do not impose my opinion on anyone.
Enjoy your visit.
9 out of 10