THE WALKER

****

Written and directed by Paul Schrader
Featuring: Woody Harrelson, Laureen Bacall, Kristin Scott Thomas, Willem Dafoe, Lily Tomlin
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This is a fine movie from the excellent Paul Schrader.  It is no TAXI DRIVER, but I doubt if Schrader will again be so situated as to produce a screenplay as prescient as that one.  THE WALKER is a very engaging and entertaining movie with a sinister an bothersome political hue nagging at the corners of the film.  It also features a brilliantly insightful performance from the redoubtable Woody Harrelson, here looking and sounding very different from the creepy private eye he plays in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.  This is surely his breakthrough performance. 

The pace of THE WALKER is a little slow and the film is somewhat talky, there’s a lot of dialogue.  The screenplay is very well written, but the plot – concerning Harrelson as a society walker called Carter Page 111 – seems overcomplicated, too expositionary and in places hard to follow.  But the picture is beautifully shot with settings powerfully conveying the interior landscapes of the characters who inhabit them.  The acting is also absolutely terrific, except for Lauren Bacall who was once sexy and beautiful but who could never act

Harrelson really carries the film with a performance of great charm.  Carter is a character whose falsity you forgive because he appears not to take himself too seriously – ‘I’m not naive, I’m superficial’ – as the non-sexual partner of women of a certain age whom he accompanies on dates gets paid for it, the ‘walker’ of the title.  When he is implicated in a murder the social circuit goes cool on him – ‘the doors in Washington are closing one by one.’  Carter is an attractive character precisely because he doesn’t lose his sense of humour in the face of rising paranoia, conspiracy and violence.  The film is a stylish and low-key political thriller. 

THE WALKER continues Schrader’s cinematic studies of lonely loners which began with Travis Bickle in TAXI DRIVER, continued with Richard Gere in AMERICAN GIGOLO, and then Willem Dafoe in LIGHT SLEEPER.  The strongest connection between these characters is with Carter and Gere’s narcissistic gigolo, but Schrader goes so far as to claim that all four men are essentially the same man at different stages in life, that therefore Carter is a version of Bickle later in life.  This seems a slightly pretentious construction, since it is difficult to find any real connection between Carter Page and Travis Bickle.  Both are interesting character creations, both loners, although Carter seemingly less so, but in Travis Bickle Schrader invented one of the most powerful and persuasive personas in cinema.  In fact Travis is certainly one of the most famous lone protagonists to grace a film and many would describe him as an antagonist – racist, bigoted, misogynist, obsessive, mentally disturbed, quite fascist in outlook.  He has all the propensities of a high school gunman, an ugly monstrous mind, yet a vulnerability which testifies to the brilliance of characterisation.  He is an animated Lee Harvey Oswald. 

But is Carter Travis Bickle later in life?  I don’t think so.  Bickle is a unique creation who lives on in movie mythology – Carter, although entirely absorbing, isn’t in the same league.   In Bickle, Schrader created a figure of urban alienation partly through his own experience of living on the streets which caught the times and still remains as potent today.  There seems little comparison between the inner rage of Bickle and the soft, effete Carter.  I suspect Schrader is placing an intellectual construction on these characters who in reality have nothing to do with one another. 

One of the best narratives of social and political mores in recent cinema.

 

1408

***

Directed by: Mikael Hafstrom
Featuring: John Cusack, Samuel L. Jackson, Mary McCormack, Tony Shalhoub, Jasmine Anthony
 

Yet another movie from another Stephen King story, this one not dissimilar to Rob Reiner’s 1990 adaptation of King’s MISERY in that much of the action takes place in an enclosed space and in theme appears to be a revenge on shallow writers. Perhaps King was thinking of himself when he wrote these stories.

1408 resembles not only Kubrick’s THE SHINING, another King story set in a hotel, but the movie BOUND where much of the action takes place in one room. Yet despite this restriction 1408 is truly visual and cinematic – BOUND is as well – and is quite imaginative even surreal in its storytelling techniques, reminiscent of JACOB’S LADDER in its nightmarish interludes and play upon alternative realities.

The story is a redemptive ghost story about a room which haunts an arrogant and conceited writer who has booked into the hotel to prove that the room is not haunted. The writer, engagingly played by John Cusack, is the author of paranormal books and a ghostbuster, even though he doesn’t believe in ghosts: he makes his money by exposing fraudulent claims. The turnaround in this situation happens rather too suddenly with Cusack’s character, Mike Enslin, becoming haunted a little too quickly, although this does give rise to some effectively comic moments.

Room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel, New York, becomes one of the main characters in the film, neatly exploring the idea of place as character, very much a part of the élan of the ghost story. Disappointingly Samuel L. Jackson plays the hotel manager as if another acting job and with no great distinction.

This is Swedish director Mikael Hafstrom’s second English language film and he has produced an effective chiller with pretensions to greater depth than is finally delivered. Hafstrom has followed the current cinematic trend for alternative realities and different interpretations of memory, al la ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND, but has not quite delivered the profundity many of the situations and images promise. There is a doppelgänger element to the story – Enslin’s good and bad sides – but this remains undeveloped and finally comes over as rather shallow and opportunist. However, the main interest of the story is its critique of the main character, producing some genuinely spooky moments.

The movie surprises on the level of its thematic complexity. What initially appears to be an ordinary horror movie with the usual farcical elements thrown in – scolding tap water, etc – becomes quite a complex narrative in the second half of the film, questioning what is real and what is fantasy. In the style of such films as BLOW UP and THE MACHINIST, it emerges that Enslin has constructed certain events in his mind and it becomes difficult to distinguish real events from those which his subconscious generates. Echoing GROUNDHOG DAY, Enslin becomes trapped in the room which becomes a halfway house between life and death with Enslin in a purgative limbo. The room takes on a life of its own, able to turn itself into other locations, other universes. In one extraordinary sequence, Enslin is drowning in a sea of souls and there is a powerful evocation of myth. In another sequence, the room turns into a polar region with Enslin caught and freezing in a blizzard.

The hotel room becomes the place where your worst nightmares are realised, where all your sins and negativity are exposed before your eyes. This gives rise to some particularly imaginative sequences. If the first half of the film is a little crass, the second half changes its nature to become a potent and often disturbing occasionally melodramatic examination of Enslin’s subconscious.

The movie is a little long and does require additional suspension of disbelief. It is imperfect but hugely engaging. Mikael Hafstrom has tried to go that extra mile and clearly he is a director to watch. This is a little gem of a movie.
 

SUGARHOUSE

*

Director: Gary Love
Featuring: Ashley Waters, Steven Mackintosh, Andy Serkis
 

There’s nothing wrong with this movie. It’s just not very good.

Some fine actors are allowed to overact and ham it up, and to treat the set as if they were in a theatre. Ashley Waters, excellent in BULLET BOY, get angry too easily and too often. The formidable Andy Serkis who played Ian Brady brilliantly in the television drama LONGFORD here turns menace into a comedy turn. The actor/director Gary Love, whose debut movie this is, should know how to control the performances from his small screen experience on such series as CASUALTY.

The movie’s theatrical origins quickly become obvious. Screenwriter Dominic Leyton has made no serious attempt to translate his stage play into cinema. Dialogue – and not very convincing dialogue – is the main coinage of the piece, static situations, and sterile debates about social issues and verbal competitions about whose backstory is most tragic and brutal. It’s exhausting to listen to.

This is yet another film about drags, those little white plastic bags. Crackheads and graffiti feature heavily. The opening montage is actually quite promising, really atmospheric and quite cinematic before the picture settles down to become a filmed stage play, and a pretty clichéd stage play at that.

We are in a low-budget depopulated inner city graffiti-daubed London. The graffiti actually looks as if it had been sprayed on by the art director moments before filming. The main set is a derelict warehouse where most of the action takes place, resulting in an insipient staginess and artificiality. The characters are stereotypes delivering heavy-handed on-the-nose dialogue and long introverted expositional speeches. Everyone gets angry all the time and unburden mountains of angst on top of one another. The storyline, such as it, is ludicrous and very predictable.

The film is extremely slow and ponderous and feels very dated while trying so hard to be hip, there’s a staleness to the ideas and attitudes which the author obviously feels are new and fresh but which somehow belong to the sixties. The characters talk and react with the shrillness of school kids – subtle this is not. Scenes are full of descriptive dialogue where characters describe their feelings and experiences – the technique of soap opera but not the way people talk in real life. Much of the time the film is a two-hander with surface dialogue which become a series of statements where there is no implication, no nuance, no subtext. The static warehouse situation, the over-the-top theatrical performances and intense talkiness reminds me of those well-meaning single-shot studio dramas the BBC used to produce, although SUGARHOUSE could never manage to shuck off its theatrical roots.

For most of the film, because of its excessive use of dialogue in static situations, the camera is reduced to filming people talking. This is sound-radio-with-pictures, you could have put this on the radio and maybe it will go on the radio, god forbid. Cinematic this was not. And the production could have done with a good sound recordist, some of the dialogue is inaudible, although that is probably a good thing. The production failed to overcome the limitations of being low-budget and it showed. The director seemed incapable of engaging with images or montage, or anything vaguely cinematic. The meaning of the piece was all in the over-projected dialogue, even the predictable contrived climax where the emotions of the characters were conveniently rearranged to serve the plot and to provide some kind of ending.

The locations, especially the warehouse, provide a lot of visual potential, but the director was unable to bring them to life, to provide atmosphere or a sense of place. No evocation and the opening sequences aside no life or buzz. It is a dead production, quite tame in its use of violence, language and subject matter.

Oh, dear. Why can’t we make subtle nuanced cinematic films like the French rather than this kind of bastardised theatre? Perhaps Godard and Truffaut were right in saying that the English and cinema were antonymous.

However, there is one great truly cinematic moment in Sugarhouse, when Andy Serkis is in a steel lift and beats its walls hysterically in anger and frustration. This is a visceral moment of genuine visual and aural power which stood out from the rest of the movie, suggesting there was a real movie there somewhere.
 

 

 

John Foster is a screenwriter whose credits include many episodes for TV series such as Z-Cars, Softly Softly, Crown Court, Juliet Bravo, Rockliffe, Saracen, The Bill. He also wrote a BAFTA award-winning BBC Omnibus on Raymond Chandler and the screenplay of Letters from a Killer, a thriller movie starring Patrick Swayze. He is a contributor to the award-winning crime collection, Mean Time.