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 Kendall Square.

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."

Novel experience "Now I know how Jane Austen felt," jokes Russell Banks as he ventures onto the publicity tour for the second film adaptation of one of his novels. Last year saw the release of The Sweet Hereafter, directed by Atom Egoyan, which received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. This year Affliction, directed by Paul Schrader, has garnered Oscar buzz for its star, Nick Nolte. Meanwhile, Banks has been busy writing screenplays for his novels Continental Drift and Rule of the Bone, both of which are in production. A third novel, The Book of Jamaica, is also on the way to the big screen. Popularity with filmmakers aside, Banks's novels don't seem to have much in common with the elegant and witty 19th-century novelist of manners. Set in the frozen north, The Sweet Hereafter related the futile efforts of a small community to respond to the death of their children in a bus accident. Affliction, which is likewise set in a snowbound small town, is about Wade Whitehouse (Nolte), a middle-aged loser who tries to come to grips with a legacy of paternal violence, abuse, and alcoholism. The recent film, Banks acknowledges, is perhaps closer to home. "It's based very loosely on family history," he says. "It's inspired by my father's relationship with my grandfather, but it could also have been my great-grandfather and his father. There's an ancestral string to these sorts of families. Some of the details and events are taken out of my own family history. The struggle Nolte goes through not to be like his father, not to repeat this cycle, that was a central conflict in my father's life too. Just the fact that he tried and failed, as did Wade, maybe made it possible for me not to have to go through that struggle. That's why the book is dedicated to my father." The subject seems perfect for director Paul Schrader, whose films -- including Taxi Driver and Raging Bull (which he wrote for Martin Scorsese) and Hardcore and Patty Hearst (which he wrote and directed) -- are obsessed with the themes of familial politics and male violence. In fact, author Paul Auster remarked that the collaboration between Schrader and Banks "proves the existence of God." "That was kind of him to say that," says Banks. "I grew up in the '60s and '70s, and I learned about movies through that generation of filmmakers. Schrader is the one I felt the most kinship with. Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Last Temptation, and so on. When he called and was interested in the option for the book, I was really flattered. I knew that there was no other director in America who could really get it. I don't know if it was predestined, but it was fortuitous." Is a career as a filmmaker also predestined for Banks? "There's the financial reward, which is real enough," he admits. "Certainly that's the case with Rule of the Bone, which I did for a studio, Fox 2000, and for which I was handsomely paid. But then there's the loss of language. The novel doesn't exist outside the language in which it's told, and with movies you're using a different language. So I ended up writing an 800-page book [Cloudsplitter, a historical novel about John Brown] that can't be adapted." Not even as a mini-series? "You could do it in six hours," he relents. "Actually, Martin Scorsese wants to produce it as a mini-series."

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.