‘Why do you have to make everything so dramatic?” Dakota Fanning asks Richard Gere in “The Benefactor.”
Good question.
An all-but-intolerable melodrama about a Philadelphia philanthropist who chairs the board of a children’s hospital and sits in his fancy digs swilling morphine, “The Benefactor” is one of those what-were-they-thinking projects in which good talent is on very bad display.
Along with Gere, who turned in a polar-opposite performance full of restraint and nuance in last year’s homeless portrait, “Time Out of Mind,” Andrew Renzi’s film stars Fanning and Theo James — both of whom look exceedingly uncomfortable in Gere’s presence.
Part of that discomfiture is necessitated by Renzi’s script, which is about Olivia, the daughter of the best friends whom Gere’s Franny lost in a terrible car crash, and Olivia’s new husband, a young doctor named Luke. The couple have moved back to Philadelphia, and Franny (short for Francis) does everything he can to make them feel at home, as in buying them a home (the one Olivia grew up in), getting Luke a gig at the hospital, and paying off a couple of hundred thousand dollars in his student loans.
In other words, Franny is a meddler. But he’s a meddler haunted by that car crash (he was in the backseat), battling a serious addiction and an even more serious case of feelingsorryforyourselfitis.
