There are moments in Richard Gere’s career when he seems determined to leave his comfort zone and challenge the image audiences have built around him. Mr. Jones, released in 1993 and directed by Mike Figgis, is one of those films.
After roles that had already established his romantic and charismatic screen persona, Gere chose to play a man who is impossible to define with a single word: charming, impulsive, brilliant, unpredictable and deeply wounded.
At the time, the character was described in the language of the period as “manic-depressive”; today, we would describe Mr. Jones as living with bipolar disorder. Gere reportedly studied the condition with Figgis and screenwriter Eric Roth and met people with bipolar disorder in preparation for the role.
And perhaps this preparation is one of the reasons his performance still feels so convincing.
A man who wants to fly
Mr. Jones enters the story almost like a force of nature.
He is working on a construction site when he suddenly becomes convinced that he can fly. He climbs onto a high beam, exhilarated by the planes passing overhead, until his colleague Howard realizes that he is in serious danger and saves him.
Jones is taken to a psychiatric hospital, where he meets Dr. Elizabeth “Libbie” Bowen, played by Lena Olin.
Libbie initially sees him as a patient who needs to be understood and treated. But Jones is not an easy case. He challenges her professionally and personally, forcing her to confront aspects of herself that she would rather keep under control.
As she gradually discovers more about him, she begins to understand that beneath his extraordinary energy lies a much darker reality: periods of depression, repeated hospitalizations and a profound struggle with the idea of giving up the highs that make him feel intensely alive.
That is what makes Jones so fascinating. He doesn’t simply want to be “cured.”. He is afraid that losing his manic highs will also mean losing the most creative, passionate and alive part of himself.
Lena Olin: the woman who looks beyond the patient
Lena Olin is an important part of the film’s emotional balance.
Her Dr. Libbie Bowen is not simply there to react to Richard Gere’s performance. As a psychiatrist, she initially tries to observe Jones professionally, but the more she understands him, the more complicated her own feelings become.
Their relationship crosses professional boundaries, creating one of the film’s most controversial aspects. Yet Olin manages to communicate the conflict between the doctor who knows what she should do and the woman who cannot remain emotionally detached.
The chemistry between Gere and Olin is therefore very different from the romantic chemistry audiences might have expected from Gere at that stage of his career.
It is more troubled. More dangerous. And much less predictable.
Richard Gere, the piano and the music inside Mr. Jones
There is one sequence I particularly love. Mr. Jones enters a piano and organ store and begins playing. And suddenly, the frenetic energy disappears. He sits at the piano and becomes completely absorbed in the music.
Richard Gere’s ability as a pianist is not simply a piece of trivia here. The music becomes part of the character’s emotional language. Contemporary criticism specifically highlighted the scene, noting how quietly and naturally Gere plays, while describing music as something that seems to calm Jones in a way almost nothing else can.
This is one of those moments when I forget that I am watching an actor performing. Richard sits at the piano with an extraordinary naturalness, moving between passages with confidence and spontaneity. The scene reveals something that words cannot: music is one of the few places where Mr. Jones can simply exist without fighting himself.
And perhaps that is why I find Gere’s piano scenes so fascinating throughout his career.
Whether he is playing in Pretty Woman, Hachi or Mr. Jones, there is always something wonderfully effortless about him at the instrument. In Mr. Jones, however, the piano has an additional meaning. It becomes a refuge.
The unforgettable crazy moments
What makes Mr. Jones so different from a conventional psychological drama is its unpredictability.
One minute Jones can be charming and irresistible; the next he is behaving in a way that leaves everyone around him completely bewildered.
He interrupts a Beethoven concert and attempts to conduct the orchestra, convinced that he can improve the performance. The sequence is both funny and unsettling because we experience the world from Jones’s perspective: in that moment, he genuinely believes he belongs up there.
And then there is another scene that I absolutely adore. Jones impulsively kisses a woman he doesn’t know and then runs away, leaving her and the people around her completely stunned.
It is crazy. It is reckless. It is completely unexpected. And somehow, Richard Gere makes it impossible not to smile.
These moments could easily have turned the character into a caricature. Instead, Gere gives Jones enough humanity to make us understand that there is a real person behind the seemingly absurd behavior.
A difficult character, played without fear
What impressed me most about Gere’s performance is the contrast.
He can be magnetic, almost boyishly joyful, and then suddenly descend into a completely different emotional state.
The transformation between his euphoric highs and his depressive lows was one of the aspects critics noticed in his performance. Roger Ebert, for example, praised how clearly the film communicates Jones’s subjective experience and how convincing Gere is in those transitions.
This was not an easy character to play. Gere had to make us believe in a man whose behavior can be frustrating, frightening, hilarious and heartbreaking — sometimes within the same scene. And he does something particularly important: he doesn’t ask us to judge Jones too quickly.
Instead, he invites us to watch. To wonder. To try to understand.
My view
I have to admit that there is another reason why I love Mr. Jones.
Richard Gere was at an extraordinary point in his career, and yes, he was incredibly handsome — at the height of his mature, magnetic sex appeal. But that is only the superficial part of the story. What really fascinated me was seeing him completely surrender to a character who could be so wonderfully, irresistibly crazy.
I adore the piano scene. I adore the Beethoven sequence. And I especially love that completely unexpected kiss followed by the mad dash away from the consequences of his own impulse.
These are the scenes that make Mr. Jones unforgettable to me.
The role was complicated and, at times, uncomfortable. The film itself has imperfections and received mixed critical reactions; it was not a major commercial success either. But Richard Gere’s performance remains the reason I would return to it.
He makes a difficult man believable. He makes a troubled man fascinating. And somehow, despite all his contradictions, he makes us care about him.
That, for me, is one of the qualities that has always distinguished Richard Gere: he is willing to take characters that could easily fail in another actor’s hands — and make us stay with them until the very end.
