AFFLICTION (Lions Gate) Starring: Nick Nolte, James Coburn, Sissy Spacek, Tim True, Willem Dafoe. Screenplay: Paul Schrader, based on the novel by Russell Banks. Producer: Linda Reisman. Director: Paul Schrader. MPAA Rating: R (profanity, adult themes, violence) Running Time: 114 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
I don't blame Paul Schrader for thinking he could get away with voice-over narration where so many others had failed. After all, he did set the standard for ideal use of the device when he let us into the mind of Travis Bickle in TAXI DRIVER. Every once in a while, a talented writer will figure out just when he can get away with the narration crutch, and for what purpose. Schrader forgot those things while adapting Russell Banks' AFFLICTION. Working with all the elements for a raw dramatic masterwork, he appears unclear how to tell the story through to its conclusion. And in a fit of panic, he turns the final minutes of the film into a mess of ham-fisted plot summary and perplexing epilogue.
It's a crying shame, because the set-up for AFFLICTION is so utterly compelling. Nick Nolte stars as Wade Whitehouse, a lifetime resident of a small New Hampshire town. Recently divorced, Wade spends his days as a civil servant -- running the snowplow and serving as crossing guard -- while also acting as the town's lone part-time cop. He's trying to put his life back together, even beginning a new relationship with a long-time friend named Marge (Sissy Spacek), but his life has been permanently scarred by his abusive, alcoholic Pop (James Coburn). The death of his mother brings Wade back into his father's house, rekindling long-buried emotions just when his suspicions of foul play in a recent hunting accident have him on edge.
The heart, soul and twisted guts of AFFLICTION lie in Nick Nolte's performance as Wade, as beaten-down a human being as the screen has ever seen without turning him into a "lovable loser." Whipped into a psychological submission by his Pop, Wade crawls through life on his belly -- working menial jobs at the whim of a town Selectman (Holmes Osborne), feared and abandoned by his ex-wife and daughter because he has abandoned them emotionally, taunted by a wealthy man to whom he tries to serve a traffic ticket. Afraid of turning out anything like his father, Wade absorbs every bit of pain for fear that releasing it will cause him to lose control. He's tragic and pathetic and doomed, and Nolte nails him.
Schrader, on the other hand, doesn't seem convinced that he has nailed Wade. The film opens with narration by Wade's younger brother Rolfe (Willem Dafoe), narration which appears at irregular intervals. Initially, the narration is simply florid and unnecessary; later, it begins to repeat entire scenes just completed, as though afraid we might have just walked in from the lobby and missed something. Finally, the narration becomes absolutely insufferable, summing up every theme from the previous two hours in a few tidy sentences that makes you wonder why you spent your time with Wade instead of his self-appointed shrink. That narration is part of an attrocious conclusion that nearly ruins the film, tagging on explanations of much that has gone before and some that comes after. Either Schrader ran out of money to show us all this significant material, or he ran out of ideas regarding how to do it.
Perhaps such a gaping hole in the resolution of the protagonist's story should have ruined the film, but there's too much else that works in AFFLICTION. Cinematographer Paul Sarossy, who captured Russell Banks' winter mindscapes previously in THE SWEET HEREAFTER, captures a sense of chilly isolation, and the supporting cast -- notably Coburn's casually emasculating turn as Pop -- is solid top to bottom. There's an ache at the core of AFFLICTION as painful as the rotting tooth that, in a Shakespearean display of psychic corruption manifested through physical corruption, torments Wade through much of the film. There will also be an ache in the head of many viewers, as Schrader spends the film's critical final minutes beating them with a Moral to the Story that anyone able to add single-digit numbers should comprehend unassisted. It may have worked for Travis Bickle, but here Schrader's use of narration nearly trumps Nolte's triumph. It's enough to make an edgy critic ask, "Are you _still_ talkin' to me?"
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 winter overkills: 6.
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