Review: The Benefactor (aka Franny)

Wealth can be as insidious as addiction, and generosity can often be a bullying act. The Benefactor, originally titled Franny, stars Richard Gere as a philanthropist whose gestures of magnanimity come to resemble a series of suffocations.

Still reeling from the part he played in causing the car accident that killed his married college friends Bobby and Mia (Dylan Baker and Cheryl Hines), Francis "Franny" Watts has been somewhat of a recluse in the ensuing five years. Self-exiled in a luxury hotel, Franny spends his days in a drug-addled haze, downing the liquid morphine prescribed for his damaged leg. He rouses himself from his stupor upon receiving a call from Olivia (Dakota Fanning), Bobby and Mia's daughter on whom he doted as if she were his own.

Olivia announces her marriage, pregnancy, and intention to return back home to Philadelphia. Franny welcomes her with arms wide open, securing a position for her husband Luke (Theo James) at the children's hospital he built with and for Bobby, buying back Olivia's childhood home and presenting it as a wedding present for the young couple, and even paying off all of Luke's student loans. Luke is understandably uneasy though Olivia, partly due to her remorse at leaving Franny alone during his recovery and partly because she wants her baby to know her family in one form or another, is more complacent. "I don't think we can say no," she tells Luke. When he protests again, Olivia explains that Franny has always been this way with her parents, who were simply friends and didn't need anything from Franny.

This may be a bit naive for Olivia to say considering the existence of the children's hospital, yet it can at least be filed under the recollection of events from a child's limited perspective. What strikes one as somewhat incomprehensible is Bobby and Mia's integration of Franny into their home. Perhaps they too bristled at his disregard for personal boundaries but, in Franny's recollections, they were all too willing to literally welcome him into their bed and their lives whenever it pleased him. Yet something slightly more sinister is at play in Franny's dealings with Olivia and Luke. There are shades of Vertigo in Franny's efforts to turn the young couple into Bobby and Mia and, for the briefest of spells, a Rosemary's Baby-type dread undergirds Franny's motivations.

If writer-director Andrew Renzi had chosen to focus only on that aspect, The Benefactor might have been an engrossing psychological drama that could make for an interesting double feature with Joel Edgerton's The Gift. As a portrait of addiction, one in which Franny uses both pharmaceutical and physical crutches to disguise his loneliness and cowardice, The Benefactor certainly benefits from Gere's showy performance. That said, Gere is far more resonant as a man in emotional collapse during moments of stillness, such as the one where he sits in the hospital emergency room in order to get a fix. As an essay on how generosity is accompanied by some degree of quid pro quo, that it can induce a guilt of obligation within the recipient and a sense of entitlement from the benefactor, the film offers intriguing points for discussion.

The problem is The Benefactor cannot be all these things at once as Renzi does not yet possess the ability to combine all of these elements and give them all equal footing in one film. Instead of complexity, there is a muddle. It is as if Renzi had planted all the proper signposts and didn't allow them to guide him to his destination. Renzi's musical choices - "My Girl" and "The Dark End of the Street" amongst them - though too on-the-nose in their reflection of Franny's internal barometer - are distracting to the point of being ineffective.

The Benefactor

Directed by: Andrew Renzi

Written by: Andrew Renzi

Starring: Richard Gere, Dakota Fanning, Theo James, Dylan Baker, Cheryl Hines, Clarke Peters, Brian Anthony Wilson