Pop affliction

Paul Schrader enriches the Banks account

by Peter Keough

AFFLICTION. Directed by Paul Schrader. Written by Paul Schrader based on the novel by Russell Banks. With Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek, James Coburn, Willem Dafoe, Mary Beth Hurt, Jim True, Marian Seldes, Holmes Osborne, and Brigid Tierney. A Lions Gate Films release. At the Showcase (Route 6 only).

At last, a film about family woes that practices truth in advertising. Unlike the ironically labeled Happiness and The Celebration and the sanctimoniously monikered One True Thing, Paul Schrader's adaptation of Russell Banks's harrowing novel Affliction plays it straight. From the opening scene, the oppression, rage, and pathos of generations of patriarchal violence settles in to stay like the late-autumn deep freeze lacerating the story's upstate New Hampshire setting. Starker and more primeval than Atom Egoyan's brilliant rendition of Banks's The Sweet Hereafter, Affliction unsparingly lives up to its title and transcends it, transforming the squalid travails of its characters into the clarity and consolation of tragedy.

The unlikely hero is Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte in his finest performance), a middle-aged loser who makes ends meet by drilling wells and plowing snow for shifty local entrepreneur Gordon LaRiviere (Holmes Osborne) and serving as the town's token, part-time police officer. His marginal life is a concatenation of humiliations, folly, and bad luck, with just enough bewildered awareness of his condition to worsen it.

His plans are inspired by decency and love but spiral inevitably to the opposite. Divorced twice from his high-school sweetheart, Lillian (Mary Beth Hurt), and hoping to marry his nurturing waitress girlfriend, Margie (Sissy Spacek), and start a new life, he tries to win the affection of his sullen young daughter, Jill (Brigid Tierney), by buying her a cheesy tiger costume and taking her to a town Halloween party, all of which he admits is "kind of pathetic." While he's out smoking a joint with his young pal Jack Hewitt (Jim True), Jill calls her mom and asks to be taken home. "I did not hit anyone," insists Wade when he knocks off the Tyrolean hat of his ex-wife's Volvo-driving new husband. "I am not going to hit anyone."

Not yet, at any rate. The next day, as he's performing one of his few official police duties as school crossing guard, a reference to his daughter causes him to freeze in the middle of the road like Ray Bolger's Scarecrow, halting traffic. A BMW zips by, nearly hitting him. When he shows up at the ritzy home of the offender, rich Bostonian Mel Gordon (Steve Adams), to present a citation, the ticket is thrown back at him, the door slammed in his face.

"I feel like a whipped dog," he confesses on the phone late at night, nursing a mounting toothache, to his younger brother, Rolfe (Willem Dafoe), a history professor at Boston University. "But someday I'm going to bite back."

And so he will, in a scenario similar to Paul Schrader films dating back to his screenplay for Taxi Driver. Mel Gordon's father-in-law, Evan Twombley (Sean McCann), has been killed in a hunting accident involving Jack, and Wade is goaded by his brother Rolfe's suspicions ("All I care about is what happened," Rolfe says. "I am a student of history, remember?"). "Playing policeman" as a scoffer puts it, Wade begins to put together a conspiracy theory that includes Mel Gordon, Gordon LaRiviere, Jack, and all the demons that torment him -- and that when resolved, however disastrously, will somehow vindicate him.

"Somebody needs to be punished," he tells Rolfe -- and that's the same compulsion that raged through The Sweet Hereafter, the need to give meaning to the devastations of chance and biological determination by identifying a guilty party. Yet to identify the source of Wade's malady -- and Rolfe's -- would be to pursue an endless chain of fathers afflicting sons with inherited violence. The immediate link is the brothers' father, Glen (James Coburn as an Archie Bunker from hell), lovingly called Pop no doubt because of his ready fists. Shrunken now and almost pitiful, Pop remains a hateful reminder to Wade of his legacy and fate and a catalyst of the catastrophe to come.

But it's a catastrophe that remains mysterious. The most elusive quality of Banks's fiction is the slippery nature of point of view, of truth and its perception. Although the challenge here is simpler than that faced by Egoyan in The Sweet Hereafter with that tale's multiple narratives, it may be more profound. The story is told by Rolfe as an attempt to re-create after the fact what really happened, and it's telling that the first word of his infrequent but meticulous voiceover narrative is "Imagine."

A refugee from his father's violence, Rolfe can be seen as its greatest victim. (When he tells Wade that he's escaped "the affliction of my father's violence," Wade laughs and says, "That's what you think.") His alternative to anger is having no feeling at all, instead maintaining the icy detachment needed to comprehend it and, like fellow afflicted artists Paul Schrader and Russell Banks, to reinvent it as beauty.

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Novel experience

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