Affliction

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Paul Schrader. Wrote a few Scorsese movies. Wrote and directed a whole bunch of his own. Sorta Scorsese-esque himself, but without the visual panache. He's maybe a little more workmanlike in his technical abilities.

I've seen a few of his movies, and they range from kinda bad to pretty good, but none have really blown me away. That is, none ever blew me away until I saw Affliciton... which still didn't blow me away. But I liked it. It falls smack dab in the middle.

Sorry Paul, I must yet again damn you with faint praise.

This is a character study, but I like that on occassions it pretends to be a murder mystery. Ever see The Big Easy? It's a great detective movie that keeps pausing every so often to hang out, forget the plot, and flesh out the characters and their relationships. Affliction is sort of the inverse of that: it's a talky character movie that every now and then pauses to be a detective story. Only the detective story turns out to be a red herring.

Nick Nolte is very good in this, but Nick Nolte is very good in everything. In fact, I think Nick Nolte has made a career out of being very good in slightly above average but not often great movies. I guessHere he plays a small town cop who had an abusive childhood, and he becomes obsessed with a possible murder and slowly loses his mind, and ends up essentially turning into his father, etc etc, you get the gist.

It also has a distracting and unneccesary (although only sporadically used) narration, and some really heavy-handed flashbacks (James Coburn won an Oscar for this?). The good outweighs the bad, but it's flawed.

Anyways Paul, let's get things more on the Auto Focus or Hardcore side of your spectrum here. You know, next time I arbitrarily pick one of your movies to watch, I'm saying. Make it a great one.