Affliction (1998)
Director: Paul Schrader Cast: Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek, James Coburn, Willem Dafoe, Mary Beth Hurt, Jim True, Holmes Osborne Screenplay: Paul Schrader (book by Russell Banks) Producers: Linda Reisman Runtime: 113 min. US Distribution: Lions Gate Filims Inc. Rated R: Violence, language
Copyright 1998 Nathaniel R. Atcheson
Affliction is based on a novel by Russell Banks, and has been adapted for the screen and directed by Paul Schrader. The film features brilliant performances from Nick Nolte and James Coburn, but it suffers from the inescapable burden of voice-over narration. This is some of the worst narration I've ever encountered -- it's ham-handed, condescending, theme-spewing nonsense, provided by a peripheral character as if he's the center of the film. The film didn't engage me properly, and this is why.
After all, Nolte's performance has finally proven to me that he's a good actor, not just an annoying bundle of machismo (which is what I thought of him until very recently). He plays Wade Whitehouse, a small-town rent-a-cop employed by the city. We follow him through his trifling, pathetic life. His ex-wife (Mary Beth Hurt) thinks he's a wreck, and they have a daughter whom he only sees on the weekends. And he's romantically involved with Margie Fogg (Sissy Spacek), a local woman who sees something in him that no one else does.
On the first day of deer hunting season, a rich member of the community ends up dead; the only witness is Jack Hewitt (Jim True), Wade's partner and friend. Jack says that it was an accident, that the man was clumsy and shot himself. Wade doesn't quite believe him, and begins to construct an insane plot in which his boss, Gordon (Holmes Osborne), has sold out to a big corporation in order to take over the town. Woven through all this is character background on Wade -- his alcoholic father (James Coburn), and his abusive behavior towards Wade and his brother, Rolfe (Willem Dafoe).
Affliction is certainly not a bad film, even though there were points during which I was so frustrated that I wanted to walk out of the theater. It does, after all, feature two of the best performances of the year. Schrader also makes some interesting artistic choices; the film has a cold, ominous tone. We get the feeling that the characters are always on the edge of their feelings, as if the slightest change might destroy their lives. There are many wonderful shots throughout the picture, such as a pair of headlights moving slowly through the white landscape of early-evening.
But Schrader is also responsible for the film's overall failure. It seems that one of the main problems with adapting a novel into a film is that so much information must be converted from exposition. Atom Egoyan, who adapted Banks' The Sweet Hereafter, managed to get all the important information from the book onto the screen without resorting to flashbacks and voice-overs. Schrader, however, has taken the easy way out. Instead of letting us imagine the horror Wade and Rolfe go through with their father, he shows it to us in grainy, manipulative flashbacks. Whose flashbacks are they? Well, we assume they're Wade's, although they play more like a horrific home video with no real point-of-view.
This brings me to the film's central flaw, which is Rolfe's voice-over narration. The narration opens and closes the film, and can be heard in various parts throughout. In the opening shots, Rolfe explains to us what's going to happen to Wade. In the concluding sequences, he tells us what's wrong with Wade. He spells out to us the theme -- the way a father's abuse can ruin a child -- so explicitly that I almost wondered why Schrader had bothered making the film at all. On one level, it's interesting to see the way Rolfe denies the fact that he, too, was "afflicted by that man's violence" (as he puts it), but the mere presence of the narration is both insulting and frustrating. I'd imagine that Banks framed the novel this way, but it seems clear that Schrader should have changed this in the interest of cinema.
Thankfully, Nolte and Coburn are present to hold the picture together. We get a sense of Wade's desperation, and we realize his desire to actually be someone -- to have a purpose in his life. Nolte subtly conveys the developments through skillful acting, making me wish Schrader had just trusted us to get what we need from his performance. Coburn is also fascinating as the abusive father, especially in his last scene, when it seems that the entire purpose of his life was to turn Wade into a mean son of a bitch.
But I was sidetracked, even with the power of these two performances. I didn't sympathize with the characters the way I should have, mostly because of Schrader's ill-advised and baffling direction. Affliction is a story about Wade, a pathetic man who lies to himself. It's not a story about Rolfe, Wade's sound-minded brother, who gazes on the situation without the objectivity he thinks he has. I don't know why Schrader chose to frame the picture through Rolfe's eyes, but, in doing so, he has wronged a perfectly good story, and a couple of perfect performances.
Psychosis Rating: 5/10
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Nathaniel R. Atcheson
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