Nobody's Fool (1994)
A Film Essay by Mark O'Hara
June, 1999, Oxford, Ohio
It's been five years since Robert Benton adapted Richard Russo's long novel Nobody's Fool and directed Paul Newman as its title character Donald Sullivan, the irascible Sully. It's June of 1999 now and I just finished my yearly viewing of it, and the film plays just as good each time. It's almost therapeutic for me to view it, to watch Russo's true American character, as much hero as sad sack, a man who's made scads of mistakes but has hit a streak of luck that makes us love him.
It's pure pleasure to watch Newman as Sully. Throughout the performance he inhabits the role with a mix of weariness and comfort. With his long experience, Newman has mastered what might be called under-acting, his manner natural, his voice gruff, his blue eyes gleaming with assurance. A 70 year-old playing a man 10 years younger, Newman gets Sully's limp perfect, and creates a very believable crust on the outside of a man who has begun to discover he can do this living the right way after all.
Upstate New York is the setting - the decaying town of Bath, closed factories overlooking the once prosperous streets. Benton's camera touches upon the locales and characters that make up Sully's world. There's the huge two-story house owned by Miss Beryl (Jessica Tandy in her last role, the film dedicated to her); Sully rents the top floor from the old woman, who decades before taught him in the eighth grade. There's Carl Roebuck (Bruce Willis), owner of the Tiptop Construction Company. Sully's in the midst of a lawsuit against Roebuck after a fall from a scaffold wrecked Sully's knee. (Yet the two still interact, Sully throwing caustic humor Carl's way, Carl throwing piecemeal work Sully's.) Carl's wife Toby (Melanie Griffith) is another of Sully's pals, the victim of her husband's countless affairs, a beautiful woman with a crush on Sully, who is old enough at least to be her dad. As Sully's sidekick, Rub Squeers (Pruitt Taylor Vince) is a poor man suffering from ingrown dreams ("You know what I wisht, Sully?" is Rub's slogan; Russo has Rub saying it hundreds of times in the book). Sully's ineffectual lawyer is Wirf (Gene Saks), a one-legged crony who can be counted on to play cards and drink in the chair to Sully's right.
Even though the action doesn't leave Bath, the plot is picaresque, following Sully's adventures as he lives a few weeks in a snowy winter. It's worth mentioning that Sully's son Peter (Dylan Walsh) calls Rub "Sancho," reminiscent of Sancho Panza, the chum of the aging but noble Don Quixote! Accordingly, Sully rescues Miss Beryl after she has a mini-stroke; Hatty - the senile mother of the woman who runs the diner Sully frequents, after she wanders out in the snowy streets, intending to walk to Albany; grandson Will (Alexander Goodwin) after he gets in a painful fight with little brother Whacker (Carl J. Matusovich). Sully also offers comforting words to Toby, boosts Rub's confidence, and even counsels his son after Peter and his wife separate. Time after time Sully plays the under-rated hero.
A hilarious subplot involves Sully's determination to get what's coming to him, compensation for his knee injury. Hence Sully steals Carl Roebuck's new snowblower, uses it on Miss Beryl's sidewalk, and loses it when Carl takes it back. In a humorously tense scene, Sully enlists Peter's help to pinch the machine again, this time from the fenced, Doberman-guarded yard of Tiptop. Another story has Sully dealing with an overzealous police officer. This subplot is set up when Sully is stopped for a broken tail-light, Officer Raymer (Philip Seymour Hoffman) cutting off Sully's truck with his cruiser. It is brought to a climax typical of dark humor, when Sully drives his pick-up along the sidewalk in an attempt to win the attention and forgiveness of Rub. Raymer once again cuts off the F-150, and when Sully keeps coming, the inept cop fires a warning shot, inviting Sully's knockout punch to the nose. The climax of the film actually unwinds around Sully's short jail term for this assault, as Sully and the town discover just how much the old ne'er-do-well is worth to their lives.
So Sully's personality has many sides, most of them contradictory. "If you can be a grandfather to him (Will), why can't you be a father to me?" is what Peter intones resentfully, supplying one of the few predictable parts of the plot, weak because of its repetition. A touching part of the story comes when we learn that Sully's father was a hopeless alcoholic, a man who knocked his wife across the room and pounded his son Donald when he stood up once for his mother. The empty Sullivan house stands as a bleak reminder of Sully's grudge against his long-dead father; all these years Sully has refused to refurbish or even to pay taxes on the property, haunted as it is with memories of dysfunction.
Robert Benton picks and chooses parts of Benton's novel carefully. He has included the elements needed, of course, to ensure a rather smooth and comprehensible plot. A film is no novel, though, and Benton knows better than to include too much detail from Russo's Dickensian storyline. Hence we never meet Rub's wife, who in the book steals daily from her job at the five-and-dime; we never see the darker, adulterous side of Peter, in his affair with a girl from West Virginia (where he has been laid off from a teaching job at the university), and later with a revenge-seeking Toby. But the story flows well - certainly more character- than plot-driven. In all the film has an admirable lack of sentimentality, even though it uses moments both bitter and sweet to evoke responses in the viewer.
The casting is masterful. I've written enough about Newman already. The rest of the cast is also flawless. The way in which Rub acts the born loser, his eyes darting around as Peter takes the jelly donut off his plate and gives it to the boy Will; the way Wirf and the police chief sit nonchalantly around the table as the group plays strip poker, Carl and his latest bimbo buck naked - these veteran actors all seem to portray character parts with expertise and relish.
Though at times the pace of the film is slow, the story builds a momentum as its threads are brought together. The character of Donald Sullivan is not new to American literature. In recent years John Updike mined the same material in four books, his man Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, an adolescent sports hero, irresponsibly deserting his young family and seeing the consequences years later. In Nobody's Fool, there is something about the way Russo and Benton have drawn Sully that makes the viewer feel sympathy. We want the guy to succeed, and I would submit that we enjoy watching the gritty and frustrating and absolutely charming rogue over and over for years to come.
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