Richard Gere's Norman Oppenheimer remains an enigma throughout this peculiar fantasy delivered as though it's a political biopic - nothing is learned of his family background, we don't know for certain where he sleeps, and there is no information as to his motivations for injecting himself as a "fixer" into the affairs of businesspeople, politicians and Jewish organisations in New York - and perhaps viewers are supposed to assume stuff about him, like he is the kind of dissociative, pathologically elusive character they've seen in Six Degrees of Separation or "Catch Me If You Can", which would be fine except that this frustrating film also finds myriad ways to keep Oppenheimer's actual "fixing" a mystery, with a titlecard eclipsing three crucial years of his life as Israeli Prime Minister Eshel's best friend - the relationship that is at the heart of the movie - and all potentially enlightening conversations observed unheard through shop windows or reduced to abrupt "It's done" phone conversations with "it" - his fixing - remaining as bewildering as Oppenheimer himself.
★★☆☆☆
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