'Norman,' Starring Richard Gere, Is an Absorbing Film About a Jewish Fixer Who Finds a Piece of the Action
Full disclosure: The new movie Norman, directed by Joseph Cedar, was edited by the husband of a close friend and former debate partner from my college days; was produced by another college acquaintance; was filmed in part at the Upper West Side Synagogue that my wife’s sister used to attend; was filmed in at least one other part near the Upper West Side block where my family lived when I was born; is about the Jews, a wandering tribe of which I am a member; involves Israel, a country that would give me citizenship tomorrow; and takes for its lead character one Norman Oppenheimer, whose last name I share but to whom I am not related. As if not to let me forget the extent to which I am have am personally implicated in every scene in this movie, the Sony Pictures web version that I was allowed to watch on my laptop super-imposed MARK OPPENHEIMER in the upper left corner of the screen throughout, such that it was frequently hovering over the main character’s head: Norman, c’est toi, the words were saying to me.
But I should say, before I go on to praise this movie as one of the best I have ever seen, that my level of familiarity with the film, of implication in it, more likely predisposed me to dislike it, as I was more likely to pick up on the tiny slips, the little inaccuracies, in a movie that seemed to be, in so many ways, about my world. Not that I am a businessman/consultant/fixer in the mold of Norman Oppenheimer, nor a parvenu (I hope), nor somebody infatuated with power (I’m pretty sure). But a movie that within the first 10 minutes has a salesman at a hoity-toity store mispronounce the protagonist’s name as “Oh-ppenheimer”—the singular cross born by our ilk, the world over—is one about which I am exquisitely poised to notice all that the director, writer, and actors get wrong.