‘Longing’: Richard Gere’s Grief Drama Will Have You Mourning His Career

Adapting foreign films for American audiences is nothing new, but Richard Gere’s new movie Longing is an especially curious case. It’s an adaptation of a 2017 Israeli film written and directed by its original writer/director, Savi Gabizon. Though the action has been moved to Canada, Gabizon’s twisty story of grief and discovery remains largely the same. So it’s odd that the biggest problem with Longing is that it feels like its tone got lost in translation.

Gere plays Daniel, a wealthy American businessman who arrives for lunch with his old flame Rachel (Suzanne Clément) only to learn two bombshells at once: Nineteen years ago, she secretly gave birth to their son, Allen; and two weeks ago, Allen was killed in a car crash. In the blink of an eye, Daniel has gained and lost the idea of himself as a father. He spends the rest of the movie reeling from that massive identity shift.

With its staid camerawork, restrained performances, and somber score, Longing is most obviously trying to operate as a drama—but there are hints of dark comedy as well. In the middle of Rachel’s emotional speech about Allen, a waitress interrupts to inform the duo that the restaurant is out of veal, to which Daniel can only respond, “We’re gonna need a few more minutes, thank you.” As Daniel journeys up to Allen’s Canadian hometown to learn more about his son, Gabizon tries to blend a palpable sense of loss with darkly humorous insights into the absurdity of grief and the way people desperately try to find meaning where there is none.

It's a mix of tones that’s on shaky ground to begin with. It’s not always clear when Gabizon is intentionally leaning into heightened absurdity and when his dialogue is simply failing to capture the way people actually talk. But the movie’s foundation further falls apart when Gabizon throws a third tone into the mix: a potential erotic thriller featuring Diane Kruger as the teacher Allen was obsessively in love with.

There are scenes that feel full-on Hitchcockian as Daniel slowly begins to discover the less-glamorous side of his loner son’s stalkerish, antisocial behavior. There are even moments where it seems like Longing is going to become one of those schlocky thrillers with a big twist that upends everything. Gere’s certainly no stranger to the genre, and a dream sequence in which a giant version of Kruger’s character has sex with a building suggests nothing is off-limits here. But Gabizon ultimately has smaller-scale ambitions that clash with those more over-the-top moments.

Charitably, you could say Longing’s tonal swings reflect the wild, uneven path of grief, and the fine line between therapeutic optimism and dangerous delusion. But where the Israeli original has a warm, almost whimsical aura that helps the tonal shifts flow, the English-language remake feels icy and stilted. It’s detached from the very sense of hot-blooded humanity it’s so desperate to explore. So while it’s ostensibly a movie about obsession (Allen’s with his teacher and Daniel’s with his son), it never springs to life with obsessive fervor.

Without a strong emotional center to grasp onto, the performers remain stuck in a frustratingly muted mode. And while the third act finally introduces a more successfully comedic through line about another set of parents grieving a loss in their own irrational ways, it arrives too late to truly buoy the film. In the end, Longing mostly just leaves you longing for a more cohesive film.

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