Word: schrader
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Frank's desperation will remind some people of Taxi Driver--and, indeed, the movies share the same director, the same screenwriter (Paul Schrader) and the same ambiance (New York's night streets, teeming with hookers and junkies, quickened with the threat of sudden, pointless death). There is also, of course, the same sort of harsh yet slightly fantastical realism and the same sort of antisocial protagonist, who thinks his life might be justified if he could just leave these hellish streets behind. The fact that Frank's vantage point is, like Travis Bickle's, a moving vehicle (in Frank...
...folks dying in the snow (Fargo, The Sweet Hereafter, A Simple Plan). And they revere Nick Nolte, who has a lock on the role of the tough man--out of sorts, time and control--in a world with no use for his strengths. No surprise, then, that Affliction, Paul Schrader's film from a Russell Banks novel about family violence in New Hampshire, has placed strongly in the year-end critics' polls, and that Nolte won some Christmas laurels as best actor...
...screenwriter (Taxi Driver) and director (Patty Hearst), Schrader specializes in people spiraling into madness; for him it is their purest, most photogenic state. Affliction dawdles over small-town life: lots of boozy bonhomie and dazed snarling. The raging losers here often seem like sullen stereotypes. We could also have done without Nolte's self-crucifixion scene. But the actor finds truth in Wade's emotional clumsiness, in the despair of a man who hasn't the tools or the cool to survive. There are too many of these men in life, and not enough films that tell their sad tales...
Unless he has adapted to the new era, as has the one who calls himself Juvenal in writer-director Paul Schrader's sly and nicely understated adaptation of novelist Elmore Leonard's Touch. Played by Skeet Ulrich, he has done time in the wilderness, suffers the stigmata and can cure the incurable by the laying on of hands. Otherwise, though, he's a cool dude. He likes girls, shows no particular interest in spreading any sort of gospel and turns a politely bemused face toward the hustlers and lowlifes who swarm around when word of his preternatural healing gifts starts...
Striving for drollness, Schrader sometimes achieves a distancing effect instead. Neither the comedy nor the melodrama is quite as compelling as it might be. But Touch was never meant to be Get Shorty. It is rather a wintry meditation on the difficulties of sustaining authentic faith in the age of telemortality. For that work, its cynicism, wry but not weary, is very effective...