Affliction
Alleva, Richard
he artistic strengths of Affliction, Paul Schrader's soon-to-be-released adaptation of the novel by Russell Banks, are apparent before the film is five minutes underway. Its flaws take a...
...The relationship between the brothers might have given this movie the stabilizing power it lacks...
...Affliction is about male pride warped by the dysfunctional family and starved by desperate economics into macho brutality, paranoia, and, ultimately, madness...
...someday I'm gonna bite back," you know he means it and you know the bite will be deep...
...By the end of Affliction, Wade is just a psychotic wreck...
...I haven't read the novel...
...You can't afford to put some guy through the nearest wall when he's supposed to be working beside you tomorrow...
...Yet it is precisely the susceptibility of the film's hero to violence that gives the movie's title its meaning...
...I never really wanted to criticize it...
...I wanted to fix it...
...He does the same thing for Affliction, but also recreates the veil of whiteness that hangs in wintry northern air even on clear days...
...But Oedipus, like many other tragic heroes, asserts his freedom of spirit after undergoing his doom...
...Well, was Rolfe afflicted...
...So well shot, edited, directed, and acted is Affliction (and I haven't mentioned the great work done by James Coburn as the grizzly bear of a father, and by Holmes Osborne, who makes the local Croesus both nasty and pathetic), so authentic does it look and so potentially powerful is its story, that I found myself rooting for it even as it disappeared into the black hole of sociology...
...The New Republic's Stanley Kauffmann rightly praised the way Sarossy's work on The Sweet Hereafter (another Russell Banks story) conveyed snow's several shades of white...
...Wade's girlfriend (Sissy Spacek) almost serves that function, but she's at first oblivious to her lover's sickness and later so busy escaping from it that she can't shed any light on it...
...Here, Nolte's sometimes irritating mixture of gruffness and hysteria is well employed...
...Commonweal | 5 November 6, 1998...
...So far, so real...
...His greatest performance, the selftorturing painter in Scorsese's episode of New York Stories, is an unforgettable portrait in this vein...
...Costumer Franqois Laplante captures the quintessential wooliness of life in such a place, with even lovemaking carried on through thick sweaters and shirts and under heavy blankets...
...Schrader and his casting directors have populated it with actors who look like recognizable townspeople enduring economic decay with jaundiced calm yielding to murderous depression...
...Having been shielded in childhood by his brother from the father's abuse, Rolfe can now say, "I was never afflicted by that man's violence...
...There is simply nothing dramatic in watching a character slide without impediment into the abyss...
...Do I sound more like a script doctor than a critic...
...By the midpoint of Affliction, after witnessing Wade's countless economic and emotional problems, and having been exposed by flashbacks to his ruinous childhood, we simply can't imagine any alternative to the catastrophe Whitehouse is heading for...
...And when he says, "I get to feeling like a whipped dog...
...His face keeps setting in a sad, wry mask as his eyes scout the middle distance for some escape from humiliation...
...And is that why he initially egged on his brother into a wrongheaded murder investigation...
...Its flaws take a lot longer to kick in but they sure kick hard...
...But there is always a trap waiting for writers and directors in any drama about crescent madness, and that trap is predictability...
...We may get the feeling that what we're watching isn't really the tragedy Schrader plainly intends but a case history, open and shut...
...The dramatic conflict this would have produced, as facts and insanity divided the siblings, would have made Affliction a true tragedy instead of the tract it finally becomes...
...There's a reason for that...
...Is he less Horatio than Iago...
...But so inconsistent is the script's characterization of him (first Rolfe plants the idea of a murder plot in Wade's mind, then returns for no particular reason to warn his brother away from the idea of an investigation) and so ponderously written is his dialogue that this putatively sane sibling ends up seeming vaguely weird...
...In a place like Lawford, the epithet "asshole" is just a synonym for human being...
...Nick Nolte is exactly the right actor for this role (and it's not surprising that he became the movie's executive producer) because there is something about wounded machismo that ignites his talent...
...Also rendered well is the strange blend of tolerance and contempt males demonstrate toward each other in such a town as they go about filling the few jobs left and taking their pitiful alcoholic pleasures in the sole surviving bar and grill...
...Psychosis is a lamentable state, not a tragic one...
...Irretrievably shut...
...Lear has his Fool, Raskolnikov his Rasumikan...
...An escape hatch must be kept open even if the escape isn't taken...
...And there isn't any...
...Such words tend to lose their scurrility through repetition, and a good thing, too...
...Suppose Rolfe was kept on screen longer, initially helping his brother to investigate, and later, having realized the error, trying to pull Wade back from madness...
...Linking the death to his own boss (who had bad business dealings with the dead fellow) and imagining a Mafia-style hit, Whitehouse becomes an avenging angel with nothing to avenge...
...Another problem: since we're brought so close to a madman-in-the-making, it is important that there be a supporting character whose sanity can both contrast with, and illuminate, the lead's madness...
...Making Canadian locations impersonate New Hampshire, cinematographer Paul Sarossy and designer Anne Pritchard create a town called Lawford that seems a real place dying a real death...
...To which Wade responds, "That's what you think...
...Yes, I know Oedipus was doomed, too...
...Too briefly open...
...Battered by his father in childhood, divorced from a wife who lost all respect for him years ago, rarely allowed to visit the daughter he adores, Wade Whitehouse, officially the chief lawman in town but really only a crossing guard and a hired hand for Lawford's only Commonweal | 4 November 6, 1998 successful businessman, yearns to find and assert his masculinity...
...The character plainly meant to put Wade in perspective is his brother Rolfe (Willem Dafoe), who both appears in the story and narrates it...
...Impossible to say since the script doesn't delve...
...He thinks he's found his chance when a visiting rich man is killed in a hunting accident...
Vol. 125 • November 1998 • No. 19
