Paul Schrader has rounded up a helluvalotta talent to create a
"Fargo" for unrepentant neo-realists. Set in Lawford, a desolate
backwoods town not far from the Canadian border, the story revolves
around the plaid-shirt pessimism and hopelessly stupid ways that
people in small towns prove that Freud and Darwin are correct. They
grow up to be like their parents, and the survival of the fittest is
a ruthless principle of life.
The characters are as sterile as their cold environment. The plot
involves Wade Whitehouse trying to rise above his divorce and little
law-enforcement gig as a crossing guard. By the time we meet Glen
Whitehouse, viciously enacted by a bloated James Coburn, we know that
Wade can't do much of anything, and his father will be the death of
him.
A real estate developer is buying up all the land, and a few locals
are trying to get in on the action, but Wade sees momentous things
looming behind this, although it's the only good thing to happen in
the second half of the 20th century to most of these spent farm
towns. A businessman gets shot, and Wade envisions the Mafia, then
his buddy hired as an assassin. The way the story is filmed, we are
encouraged at first to believe Wade's delusions. Slowly - in fact,
painfully slowly - we come to see that Wade was broken by his pa. And
there weren't never no other way fer things to turn out... and
finally, after two aching hours, it's over.
But not without a narrative to kick it while it's writhing on the
ground! A voice-over by Willem Dafoe, who plays the younger, smarter
brother turned college professor, tells the story throughout, trying
to orient us. His point of view comes from the other end of Wade's
distracted and scattered phone calls, but he could only make sense of
it all after the principals were dead.
At the end, Willem's voice interprets the whole movie for us - just
in case we missed the point. It's about male violence, and how it's
an affliction, and men can't escape from it, and I think he uses a
couple phrases like "legacy of machismo" and "pathology of the
father" - ouch! In short, he thinks we are as stupid as these
characters and need an explanation that is too high-flown for people
like them to understand anyway. Schrader may have come from such a
community, as many others did, but this approach to his past does not
reflect well on the time he has spent becoming an educated,
insightful and artistically sensitive man. Which I believe he is!
Schrader seems obsessed with violence. It is at the core of all his
films (including that wonderful big-budget experimental film,
Mishima). The many manifestations of violence are impressive, but
this film, has neither style nor insight - beyond the "Affliction" of
its title. To call male violence an affliction is, however, to grant
men their animal excuse: oh well, he's beastly because he's only a
beast. It's not only tautological, it's as dull-witted as its
subject.
But I was even more offended by something in the press book: the note
that novelist Paul Auster supposedly said, "The combination of
Russell Banks and Paul Schrader in an artistic context proves the
existence of God." Sorry, boys, but She works in far more mysterious
ways than that.
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