Gere and Crawford stayed for the afternoon and then, because there were no hotels in the area, helicoptered back to Delhi Crawford left for the States. Gere went alone to Dharmsala.The following year he took the world by surprise when he hijacked the Oscars ceremony to denounce the Chinese government's policy in Tibet. "If you are listening, Deng Xiao Ping," he called to a sea of diamonds. If there was one thing you could be sure of it was that the paramount leader of the People's Republic was not watching the Oscars.Gere's peers were; and the actor was bluntly told he would never host Tinseltown's awards ceremony again Surprisingly, it has not hurt his career. With 25 films to his credit, including such minor classics as Sommersby with Jodie Foster, An Officer and a Gentleman with Debra Winger and the mega-hit Pretty Woman with Julia Roberts, he remains one of Hollywood's most bankable leading men. With Red Corner, a thriller about an American businessman who gets caught up in a murder investigation, which has just been released in America, Gere is finally dove-tailing the two dominant concerns of his life. Set in Jiang Zemin's China, and co-starring the Chinese actress Bai Ling, the film takes the audience on a journey through China's totalitarian judicial system.
"We made as tough a movie as we possibly could make," he said last week "And ... a very political one."The film is the second of three big-budget films to have come out in what Hollywood has dubbed "The Year of the Yak". The first was Jean-Jacques Arnaud's epic about Heinrich Harrer, Seven Years in Tibet, starring Brad Pitt, which is about to open in Britain after playing to a mixed reception in the States. The third, due out in December, is Martin Scorsese's biography of the early years of the Dalai Lama, Kundun.Melissa Mathison-Ford, wife of Harrison, and scriptwriter on Kundun, was one of several celebrity guests at the "Stateless Dinner", held on the top floor of the elegant Washington Hotel on Thursday evening as an alternative to the corporate feeding frenzy (aka state dinner) given for Jiang Zemin at the White House. "Tibet offers the most extravagant expression of the mystical," she told me.
"And when people meet His Holiness, you can see on their faces that they're hoping to get this hit that will transcend their lives, take them someplace else."But, once again, it was Richard Gere who caused the greatest buzz. Dressed in the same black leather jacket, he came on to the stage and, after a few pleasantries, told a story. It was about a Tibetan nun he had met who, along with a group of her fellow nuns, had held up a placard saying "Free Tibet" in their monastery. "They were immediately arrested, along with all the other women in the convent," Gere recounted. "They were taken to a police station, stripped naked and tortured and beaten. They were hung by ropes tied behind their backs; and several of them were raped with electric cattle-prods. I asked her, 'How can you handle this? How do you feel about this?' And she looked into herself, and she looked out, and she said: 'It's so much bigger than me, so much bigger than these events'."The tragedy of Tibet is also so much bigger than Richard Gere And that is the problem.
No one can deny that he has done an enormous amount to bring the Tibetan cause to the world's attention But tragedy is not his metier Melodrama is. In Red Corner he turns in a great performance, delivering lines such as "You put a nice drop cloth down here and you put a bullet right in the back of my head. Bam! Right in the back of my head! Bam, bam, bam, bam!" But Tibet is no thriller. And when he speaks about it, however much he looks inside, Gere never seems to be quite able to find the right tone The gravitas.That doesn't worry Bob Thurman. "The press says it is cheapening, and a fad, to have people from Hollywood speaking on behalf of Tibet," he told me. "But the truth is Americans listen to what celebrities do; and Richard has been a tremendous asset to the Tibetan cause."And though it is easy to be derisive of the fact that it has fallen to Richard Gere to be America's conscience about Tibet, the real object of our derision, as the veteran New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd pointed out this week, should be the politicians and corporate moguls who spent last week bending the knee to the last Communist emperor Compared with them, Richard Gere is, indeed, a bodhisattva.. When it comes to miscarriages of justice, Britain has a dismal track record.
The trials of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four demonstrate that certain crimes engender such revulsion that objectivity flies out the window. What the courts have tended to do in these cases, instead of deciding the narrow question of whether the defendants are guilty as charged, is act out a ritual in which someone acts as a receptacle for all the bad feelings - rage, disgust, horror - the crime has stirred up. What such cases have in common is an act that most of us find intolerable to contemplate, such as a terrorist bombing or the murder of children. The police come under enormous pressure and, as the Court of Appeal has been forced to recognise, tend to look for two things: speedy results and the weakest link in the chain.