Norman (2016)

This is a movie that I winced through.  Thankfully I was on a long flight after a significant delay (it turns out when your airplane has a flat tire, it is not a matter of filling it with air, or jacking it up and changing it.  Instead it requires serious equipment that is hard to come by).
Norman (played convincingly by Richard Gere) is warm and friendly to everyone he meets, fancying himself as a magnanimous, well-connected power broker who’s eager to introduce people to each other for their mutual benefit.  But it’s clear that no one really knows Norman, and even though he is on screen for nearly the entirety of the film, we realize by the end that we don’t really know Norman, either. And that’s intentional; he is a tantalizing mystery.
What Norman is after, though, is not the money that closing a big deal would bring, but rather the prestige, something that’s more amorphous and harder to acquire. He finally achieves some semblance of the access and respect he long has sought, but in the end it is a bit of a bust, one that you can see coming from a mile away.I do think that how you feel about Norman the character will determine how you feel about “Norman” the movie. He’s a complicated man, and not necessarily a likable one. Is he a shameless hustler? Or is he merely an overbearing yet well-intentioned mensch?  I thought the former, but others may believe the later.