MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Jones’: Gere Rides High as Man on a Mood Swing

In “Mr. Jones” (citywide), Richard Gere plays a manic-depressive who is a junkie for his highs. We first see him fast-talking his way onto a construction site, where he hammers a few nails and then ascends to a high beam. A plane zooms overhead as Mr. Jones--the only name he volunteers for himself--prepares for his own lift-off. What follows is a movie with its own wild mood-swings: Jones moves in and out of his highs as he moves in and out of mental institutions.

It’s a showboat performance in a showboat role, the kind most actors would commit mayhem for. (Gere is also the film’s co-executive producer.) Actors perhaps respond instinctively to manic-depressive disorder. In performance terms, it guarantees a full range of feeling, but, more than that, it’s a heightened, almost expressionist recasting of an actor’s professional life, with its abrupt alternations of elation and dejection.

The disorder also lends itself to all manner of mythic/metaphorical grandstanding about why these manic highs are more exciting, more “creative” than the mundane energies of “ordinary” people. “Mr. Jones” tries to convey Jones’ pain but it’s also trying to romanticize it.

It’s the old “Equus” agenda all over again--normalcy wilts under the hot glare of the psychologically ravaged. The sane envy the mad. Jones’ psychiatrist, Dr. Libbie Bowen (Lena Olin), is recently divorced and, despite her air of reasonableness, at odds with herself. She’s looking for succor. Jones--who has an uncanny way of instantly sizing up people’s weak spots--recognizes her desire to shake out her routine. The director, Mike Figgis, and screenwriters, Michael Cristofer and Eric Roth, don’t downplay Jones’ illness but, compared to Libbie’s quiet normality, her unexpressed desire to be “different,” he shines. As Libbie becomes dangerously, and unethically, attached to Jones, the film moves closer to its own dubious conundrum: Who can tell the patient from the therapist?

“This is not a disease. This is who I am,” Jones shouts to Libbie near the end, and then he adds, “I like who I am.” The movie (rated R for language) might not seem so lopsided if Libbie were a more powerful presence, if her empathy had the same glow as Jones’ mania. But Libbie seems to lose her smarts fairly early on; the filmmakers never really dramatize the conflict between her scruples and her heart. Olin is such a remarkable actress that some of this conflict comes through anyway, but why is it that so often women are cast as smart, caring professionals only to lose their capabilities in the face of the first strong man they cross paths with?

Why, for example, didn’t the filmmakers think to have Libbie help Jones through his love of music? It’s established early on that he was a gifted music student, and there’s a fine scene where we see him saunter into a piano and organ store and play a classical piece, quietly and full of feeling. The music calms him in a way that nothing else in the movie does. Later, he attends a symphonic concert and, ecstatic, rushes to the podium to conduct Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” (When asked later, at a competency hearing, why he did it, Jones replies that the conductor’s tempo was too slow--and he’s right.)

The filmmakers are so driven to show us Mr. Jones as a harrowing free spirit that they don’t put much faith in his redemption. They’re as hooked on Jones the high-flyer as Libbie is.

‘Mr. Jones’

Richard Gere: Mr. Jones

Lena Olin: Dr. Libbie Bowen

Anne Bancroft: Dr. Catherine Holland

Delroy Lindo: Howard

A TriStar release of a Rastar production. Director Mike Figgis. Producers Alan Greisman, Debra Greenfield. Executive producers Richard Gere, Jerry A. Baerwitz. Screenplay Eric Roth and Michael Cristofer. Cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchia. Editor Tom Rolf. Costumes Rita Ryack. Music Maurice Jarre. Production design Waldemar Kalinowski. Art director Larry Fulton. Set designer Gae Buckley. Set decorator Florence Fellman. Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes.

MPAA-rated R.