Affliction

viewed September 19, 1999 on video

This movie, to be honest, is not pleasant to watch for about half of its length.  Half of the time I'm hoping that things will turn out all right for Nick Nolte's Wade Whitehouse, and the rest of the time I'm dreading what will happen next.  It's a sledgehammer of a story that stays true to its protagonist and the snowy hell in which he half-willingly suffers through his existence.  The film is all about Wade, his apparently genetic propensity for self-destruction and torment, and nearly everything in the movie is not only seen and felt through his battered, defensive senses.  Though the scenes aren't necessarily unforgettable (most people would probably prefer to forget them), the general feeling and theme of a battered child surviving as a man certainly aren't.

I shudder to call it beautiful, but it is, in that same barren way that The Sweet Hereafter, the other film adaptation of a Russell Banks novel, was beautiful.  The sets that make up the small, hard-pressed New Hampshire town are lit either with dim, glowing lamps or equally dim daylight, in such a way that they feel like shelters from a brutal environment.  Even the silences that pervade dialogue evoke woundedness -- but it is a matter of time that we realize these effects do not reflect the mood of the town (as in The Sweet Hereafter) but of Wade's half-hidden despair.

Paul Schrader's obsession with tortured men seeking redemption finds a more muted expression under his own direction than in his collaborations with Martin Scorsese.  Here the austerity and pain is more naturalistic, in the settings, in the protagonist's unaffected manner that slips into dysfunction at the presence of his father and daughter.  Nolte growls uncomprehendably for stretches of the movie, but it fits his misunderstood.  Recalling the unfolding of the plot, it is amazing how Wade unravels.  In the beginning he suffers through a really bad Halloween party with an estranged daughter who'd much rather be returned to her mom.  Although his desperation only muddles his chances of reconnecting with his child, he's still able to work out his disappointments lying in bed with his girlfriend and a couple of beers -- there's hope for a new start.  But another shot at redemption -- solving a possible murder, uncovers the sociopathy that stems from his self-hatred.  The scenes with his father give chilling insight to his dysfunction.  Although they're at odds in the first scenes together, James Coburn as the father has an alarming resemblance to Nolte, and as much of an imposing presence.  Gradually it's apparent that as much as Wade hates his father, he can't help acting the same.  When he drinks whiskey from the same bottle as his alcoholic forebear, it's like the passing of the torch.  When they casually swagger past each other in the old kitchen, they seem to be locked in orbit. By the end, Wade has the same abusive behavior, like a genetic disease.  Though the final confrontation between the two is less than what I expected (Wade should have struggled more with carrying his father's body, to suggest the massiveness of this monstrous man).

The movie seems to be aware of its heavy-handed, almost sadistic treatment of Wade, and the epilogue spoken by his brother (Willem Dafoe, who here is pacific to the point of smugness) overcompensates with a broadside, TV movie statement on child abuse.  Despite this lame denouement, the meaning of this movie will still throb in the mind for a long time.

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