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Affliction
**1/2
Cinema
Releases - February 19, 1999
Rated on a 4-star
scale. USA. Written and directed by Paul Schrader; based upon the novel by
Russell Banks. Starring Nick Nolte, James Coburn, Willem Dafoe, Sissy Spacek,
Mary Beth Hurt, Jim True, Marian Seldes, Holmes Osborne.
Drunkenness is a state of oddly unexplainable
conflicting emotions -- such as delight and depression, or confusion and
clarity. Paul Schrader's "Affliction", a film about alcoholism
which is put together oddly, feels sort of the same way. When it was clear,
I was delighted. When it was confused, I was depressed.
It's based on a novel by Russell Banks, and the
main character is a man named Wade Whitehouse. As played by the great, gruff
giant Nick Nolte, Wade is a complete mess. He has ruined two marriages to
the same woman, and that ex-wife looks upon him with scarring contempt. His
young daughter feels frightened and embarrassed by his presence. He smokes
pot with the biggest low-lives in his cold New Hampshire town. Both his attempts
at working -- as a traffic cop and as an odd-jobs man -- are laughable. He
spends all the money he can on booze, and can't even afford to get a seriously
ailing tooth sorted out.
We get the sense that the root of Wade's problems
is his father. Glen (James Coburn), now old, but as chilling and mean as
ever, is an unforgettable man in the worst way, and as we see in creepy
flashbacks, he's terrorised his loved ones for years. The affliction of "that
man's violence", stemming from alcohol abuse, can pass through the generations,
and it's horrific to see Wade fall lower and lower, until it finally has.
Even when he tries to do some good, and solve what he thinks is a murder
mystery, he's really just letting his inebriated imagination run wild, and
creating more problems for himself and his people.
As I alluded to earlier, there is a confused and
almost boozy stream of emotions in "Affliction", and although this may sound
appropriate, I'm not so sure it is. It never decides whether it wants to
keep letting us look through Wade's window to the world, or tell Wade's story
with an unobtrusive, objective camera. In the end, it keeps switching between
the two styles, and to bewilder the audience even more, throws in a completely
unnecessary voice-over from Wade's brother Rolfe (Willem
Dafoe).
Not only does the voice-over, as I've said, create
another distracting point of view for the audience, but it goes on to hinder
even more of our emotional journey through the movie. It basically tells
us from the outset that Wade's murder mystery theory ends in disaster, so
a crucial element of suspense and hope for the character is impossible. It
also spells out the connection between Glen's and Wade's affliction far too
obviously, cheapening the adult subject matter into a package perfect for
the kiddies.
There are, however, moments of incredible power,
and the performances of Nolte and Coburn are amazing. Both men breathtakingly
paint tragic figures of unintentional anger, letting us see both the goodness
of how they want to show love, and the scariness of how alcohol corrupts
their intentions into an appearance of ferocity and stupidity. The flaws
that surround this skilful work are a great pity, because I wanted to like
the movie more.
If you want to see a good adaptation of a Russell
Banks novel, see "The Sweet Hereafter", an Oscar-nominated masterpiece from
Atom Egoyan, that was the best film of 1997. It does have conflicting emotions,
but doesn't seem so disjointed, and is therefore far more moving. "Affliction"
stops and starts too often, and by the time it was over, I wasn't involved
-- I was wondering if they'd let me re-cut it.
COPYRIGHT© 1999 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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