'The Benefactor' doesn't do its stars, or Philly, any favors

'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 - known as Franny when it was shooting here in 2014 - 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.

For Philadelphians who like to see their town on the big screen, The Benefactor tools around some of Center City's tonier districts and also makes an extended stop at the Art Museum, where Franny wanders the galleries, emerges in the Grand Hall for a gala function, and then fronts a band, singing "My Girl," outdoors at the top of the Art Museum steps. Who knows what Rocky Balboa would have done if he had been on one of his training runs at that moment, sweatily ascending just as Gere's Franny, a scarf wrapped around his neck, crooned the Temptations classic?

Mr. Balboa might have decided it was time to leave town.

srea@phillynews.com
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@Steven_Rea

StartText

Directed by Andrew Renzi. With Richard Gere, Dakota Fanning, and Theo James. Distributed by Samuel Goldwyn.

Running time: 1 hour, 30 mins.
Parent's guide: No MPAA rating (drugs, profanity, adult themes).
Playing at: AMC Neshaminy.