Affliction
USA 1997
Reviewed by Kevin Jackson
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Lawford, New Hampshire; a snowbound, economically precarious town, at the start of a typically harsh winter. Wade Whitehouse, Lawford's only policeman, is in a bad way: he's divorced, living alone in a shabby trailer, agonised by a bad tooth, drinking heavily and forced to eke out his scanty earnings with menial jobs. All his attempts to be a good father to his young daughter Jill backfire miserably, and he is clearly still in thrall to his elderly father Glen, an alcoholic bully who used to beat and berate Wade mercilessly.
Wade's only sources of comfort and sanity are the few hours he manages to spend with his girlfriend Margie and his nightly phone call to his younger brother Rolfe, who has escaped Lawford to become a history professor in Boston. Despite their support, Wade grows ever more troubled.
When a wealthy weekend visitor dies in a deer-hunting accident, Wade suspects first murder, then a conspiracy. But he is distracted from his ham-fisted attempts at investigation by the death of his mother (which brings Rolfe back to town for the first time in years), by his anguished steps to regain custody of Jill from his ex-wife Lillian, and by his excruciating toothache, which he finally cures by tearing out the rotten molar with pliers.
Desperate to regain his daughter's love, he abducts the little girl, but is so infuriated by her frightened resistance that he finally lashes out at her. Immediately horrified by himself, he lets Margie, who is leaving him for good, take Jill back to her mother. Glen taunts him, and father and son launch into a brawl which ends with Wade killing the old man and burning his corpse. Rolfe, who has been the film's narrator, explains that the supposed conspiracy was all in Wade's imagination, and that Wade's circumstances are now unknown.
Review
Though Affliction is a high-fidelity adaptation by Paul Schrader of Russell Banks' semi-autobiographical novel of 1989, it also tends to put you in mind of earlier literary works - Zola, perhaps, or the less mirthful flowerings of Scandinavian drama. Pinched by poverty, in constant pain, humiliated by the local burghers (in one scene, even the local burger chef), Wade Whitehouse is afflicted in more ways than an assiduous social worker could catalogue, and most grievously by his emotional make-up. As the film's final voiceover underlines, he's been predestined to uncontrollable rage by his father's bullying.
The themes of a toxic childhood and the cycle of masculine violence are hardly uncommon these days, but here they have been made into the stuff of tragedy rather than soap, and Schrader has added a hint of sociology: one of his reference points when shooting was Demonic Males, a recent study of primate aggression. Almost everything about the film is scrupulously sombre, from its pallid skies and deathly winter landscape - an eastern cousin (it was actually shot near Montreal) of the Midwestern snows of Fargo, and of Schrader's youth in Michigan - to the fuzzy, desaturated memory-images which replay the horrors of Wade's childhood as fragments from a broken home movie.
Like its hero, however, the film is more often agitated than sullen, with scene after scene suddenly taking off in unexpected directions or hitting unsettling tones. A small instance: when Wade goes to see a lawyer about renegotiating custody of his child, the set-up looks like a routine confrontation between poor working stiff and greedy professional, until a reverse shot reveals that the lawyer is confined to a wheelchair. Yet another damaged male? Affliction casts many such doubts, large as well as small, and sometimes where you'd least expect them. Even its own narrator is unreliable, for example, since it's Wade's younger brother Rolfe (at first sight an escapee from their father's evil, and voice of sweetly pained reason among the drunken, brawling rednecks) who eggs Wade on to believe in a non-existent murder conspiracy.
Rolfe, the articulate brother, helps give voice to Affliction's more abstract concerns - with the temptations and betrayals of storytelling, among other matters - and his final, weary account of Wade's doomed attempt to find plots where none exists sounds suspiciously like a film director's unhappiness with the glib patterns demanded by genre fiction. Wade, the inarticulate brother, embodies the film's horror. Nolte's acting of the part is almost dismayingly accomplished. His portrait of a wrecked man with futile aspirations towards common decency may be the best work he's done, and the scenes in which he tries to show tenderness for his daughter are so remorselessly exact that they're hard to watch without flinching.
After Schrader's last two unsuccessful digressions into mongrel forms of comedy with Witch Hunt and Touch, Affliction amounts to an overwhelmingly forceful return to earlier form and earlier themes. One can imagine Wade as Travis Bickle who stayed home instead of going to the wicked city, married, had a child, got a good job, knocked himself out to be sane and normal - and still ended up in middle age as a solitary brooder, inwardly howling for a savage act of redemption.
Barring some freak response to Nolte's outstanding acting, Affliction is plainly far too austere a piece of film-making to hold its own in the multiplexes, but it invites at least three superlatives: it's Schrader's bleakest film, and his most mature, and it boasts a central performance of unmatched rawness and conviction.
Credits
- Producer
- Linda Reisman
- Screenplay
- Paul Schrader
- Based on the novel by
- Russell Banks
- Director of Photography
- Paul Sarossy
- Editor
- Jay Rabinowitz
- Production Designer
- Anne Pritchard
- Music
- Michael Brook
- ©Largo Entertainment Inc
- Production Companies
- Largo Entertainment presents a Reisman/Kingsgate production
- Executive Producers
- Nick Nolte
- Barr Potter
- Line Producer
- Josette Perrotta
- Co-producers
- Eric Berg
- Frank K. Isaac
- Largo Production Executive
- Kathleen Haase
- Kingsgate Films Liaison
- Sherri Wilson
- Production Co-ordinator
- Danielle Boucher
- Production Manager
- Josette Perrotta
- Unit Manager
- Michel Chauvin
- Location Manager
- Céline Daignault
- Post-production Supervisor
- JoAnn M. Laub
- Assistant Directors
- Burtt Harris
- Pedro Gandol
- Francine Langlois
- Marie-José Bourassa
- Isabelle Brutus
- Anne Alloucherie
- Script Supervisor
- Monique Champagne
- Casting
- Ellen Chenoweth
- Kathleen Chopin
- Montreal:
- Rosina Bucci
- Toronto:
- Ross Clydesdale
- 2nd Unit Director of Photography
- Bert Tougas
- Camera Operator
- Robert Stecko
- Steadicam Operator
- Rod Crombie
- Special Effects
- Louis Craig
- L'Intrigue
- Graphic Design
- Carl Lessard
- Art Director
- Michel Beaudet
- Key Decorator
- Ginette Robitaille
- Draftsman
- Louis-René Landry
- Costume Designer
- François Laplante
- Wardrobe Supervisor
- Monic Ferland
- Make-up
- Artist:
- Diane Simard
- Additional:
- Claudette Casavant
- Hairstylist
- Bob Pritchett
- Additional:
- Manon Joly
- Titles/Opticals
- The Effects House
Music Editor- Shari Johanson
- Music Mixer
- Bill Jackson
- Soundtrack
- "Open the Door to Your Heart" by Ned Miller, performed by Bonnie Guitar; "I Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know" by Cecil A. Null, performed by Skeeter Davis; "Suite No.1 'Death of Ase' from "Peer Gynt" by Edvard Grieg, performed by Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra; "Proud to Be Loud", "Put the Hurt On" by Marc Ferrari
- Sound Mixer
- Patrick Rousseau
- Re-recording Engineers
- Dominick Tavella
- Sound One
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Tony Martinez
- Dialogue Editor
- Jeffrey Stern
- Effects Editor
- Paul Soucek
- ADR
- Recording Engineer:
- David Boulton
- Editor:
- Gina Alfano
- Foley
- Artist:
- Brian Vancho
- Recording Engineer:
- George Lara
- Editor:
- Bill Sweeney
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Dave McKeown
- Armourer
- Andrew Campbell
- Cast
- Nick Nolte
- Wade Whitehouse
- James Coburn
- Glen Whitehouse
- Sissy Spacek
- Margie Fogg
- Willem Dafoe
- Rolfe Whitehouse
- Mary Beth Hurt
- Lillian, Wade's ex-wife
- Jim True
- Jack Hewitt
- Marian Seldes
- Alma Pittman
- Holmes Osborne
- Gordon LaRiviere
- Brigid Tierney
- Jill, Wade & Lillian's daughter
- Sean McCann
- Evan Twombley
- Wayne Robson
- Nick Wickham
- Eugene Lipinski
- J. Battle Hand
- Tim Post
- Chick Ward
- Chris Heyerdahl
- Frankie Lacoy
- Janine Theriault
- Hettie Rogers
- Paul Stewart
- Horner
- Sheena Larkin
- Lugene Brooks
- Penny Mancuso
- woman driver
- Danielle Desormeaux
- Elaine, LaRiviere's secretary
- Charles Powell
- Jimmy Dane
- Donovan Reiter
- short-haired local
- Brawley Nolte
- young Wade Whitehouse
Michael Caloz- young Rolfe Whitehouse
- Joanna Noyes
- Sally Whitehouse
- Marcel Jeannin
- state trooper
- Susie Almgren
- Mrs Gordon
- Steve Adams
- Mel Gordon
- Martha-Marie Kleinhans
- Lena
- Mark Camacho
- Clyde
Ralph Allison- Reverend Doughty
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- Artificial Eye Film Company
- 10,263 feet
- 114 minutes 2 seconds
- Dolby
- In Colour
- Prints by
- Technicolor