COP-OUT
Affliction Directed by Paul Schrader
The damaged protagonists of Paul Schrader's films typically seek redemption in a violent and unforgiving world, even as they contend with their own aberrant impulses (e.g. Robert DiNiro's paranoid avenger of ruined innocence in Taxi Driver [written by Schrader in l976]); Richard Gere's alienated rentboy in American Gigolo [scripted and directed by Schrader in l979]). Schrader's latest film, Affliction, based on Russel Banks' novel, is set in a wintry New Hampshire hamlet; anatomizes a life as desolate as its icy landscape. Wade Whitehouse is the town's inept sheriff and a humiliated lackey of all labors for its leading businessman.
Savagedly abused during childhood by an alcoholic father, Wade is a hard-drinking, explosive personality, disdained by his ex-wife; feared by his beloved daughter. Nick Nolte gives a performance which beggars superlatives as a man whose lumpen facade conceals keen intelligence and surprising delicacy of feeling. Neither are sufficient to prevent his crazed quest to recuperate his savaged dignity, one which from its inception carries the seeds of psychological and moral destruction. His downfall proceeds as inexorably as that of a Sophoclean king, sans hubris. Wozzeck and Willy Loman spring inevitably to mind.
James Coburn and Willem Defoe are admirable as, respectively, Wade's brutal parent and manipulative, subtly ill-intentioned brother. But it is Nolte's tormented loser wno haunts one's memory. Like Atom Agoyan's recent version of Banks' The Sweet Hereafter (l997), Affliction takes no prisoners. Affectively challenged viewers at the time were directed instead to A Bug's Life (l998) or You Have Mail (l999).