Showtimes for all movies in the area. Click here!

'Factotum'

By Curt Holman

Movie Trailers

You can't always tell an unrecognized genius from a deluded would-be artist. In the bleak but amusing film "Factotum," Matt Dillon plays Henry Chinaski, an aspiring writer, indifferent laborer and dedicated drunk. Frequently unemployed and inebriated, Chinaski seems identical to any other misguided chump with an artistic streak, except that he happens to be the fictional alter ego of the late Charles Bukowski, the Los Angeles "skid row poet" who rose from obscurity to cult status to international acclaim.

The film is largely adapted from Bukowski's novel "Factotum," and Dillon and Norwegian director/writer Bent Hamer take a pub-crawl through the character's struggles. As Chinaski scribbles hard-boiled verse, beds boozy women and gets himself fired, he remains defiantly out of place with the world, his family and even other reprobates.

"Factotum"'s gutter-level perspective would be depressing if the film didn't maintain such a strong, fatalistic sense of humor.

Chinaski takes jobs at such dreary venues as pickle factories and bicycle warehouses, although he'll run off to the nearest bar the minute his supervisor's back is turned. "Factotum" pits Chinaski against a seemingly endless line of starchy middle managers, virtually identical guys with thinning hair, narrow mustaches and absent smiles. Compared to their joyless ranks, Chinaski seems more truly alive, if not exactly a role model. Chinaski sums up his self-destructive integrity when he informs a desk jockey that he plans to use his paycheck to get drunk: "It may not be noble, but it's my choice."

Following his Oscar-nominated performance as the racist cop in "Crash," Dillon makes Chinaski more than just a misanthropic boozehound. The former teen heartthrob has evolved into a remarkably subtle performer, and "Factotum" provides a showcase for Dillon's understated magnetism, commanding our attention while doing very little obvious "acting."

It's easy to perceive "Factotum" as the actor's response, almost 20 years later, to Barfly's drastically different portrayal of Chinaski by Mickey Rourke (Dillon's old "Rumble Fish" co-star). Rourke offered a more swaggering portrayal of the poet as a filthy, roaring Neanderthal. Dillon gives Chinaski some alpha-male qualities in his out-thrust jaw and the proud swing of his arms, but also has a more soft-spoken, fastidious quality. In his writerly discipline and even in the tightness of his closely cropped beard, we recognize a perceptive soul amid the flophouses and barstools.

In addition to Chinaski's war with the working week, "Factotum" tracks his off-again, on-again love affair with Jan (Lili Taylor), a floozy who can match him drink for drink and doesn't care about good housekeeping. They tend to encourage each other's worst instincts: Jan flirts with a jerk at the racetrack to goad Chinaski into picking a fight, but she also bears the brunt of his violence when he backhands her off a barstool during a domestic squabble.

At other times, the couple's relationship very nearly becomes a rock-bottom romance for the down and out. When Chinaski contracts crabs and an agonizing rash, Jan tenderly wraps his groin in gauze, then beams up at him: now that's love. Later, after the pair walk for blocks to retrieve beer money and Jan complains of her high heels, Chinaski gallantly removes his shabby shoes and places them on her aching feet. It's like Cinderella discovering a Prince Charming as broke as she is.

At times "Factotum" wanders off-track. Matt Dillon nevertheless provides one of the year's strongest performances, and images from the film linger long in the memory, such as Marisa Tomei as another of Chinaski's floozies, looking bleary-eyed and disheveled - yet somehow still alluring - in the harsh light of a liquor store. Or Chinaski framed in the window of a huge, otherwise featureless brick wall, like a lonely prisoner of capitalism looking in vain for a way out. CV

'The Quiet'

By Jonathan Kiefer

Movie Trailers

A typical locution in "The Quiet" begins like this. The sensitive teen jock Connor (Shawn Ashmore) finally gets the sullen teen orphan Dot (Camilla Belle) alone, and he says, "I can smell your hair. Smells like cucumbers. ... I got really, really hard last night." Now, in Connor's defense, he, like everyone else in the movie, has been under the impression that Dot can neither hear him nor respond. Word around the cafeteria is that she's a deaf-mute - and, it would seem, a sounding board for other people's most licentious impulses.

That's almost a good idea for a trashy thriller, or even for a sophisticated psychological drama, but as you may already be able to deduce from its dialogue, and as I can attest from having witnessed its tortured performances, this movie is neither of those things. Nor, unfortunately, is it an intentional comedy. After a little more sputtered soul-baring, Connor closes with a lamenting summation: "What am I gonna do, this sex addict with a learning disorder who forgot how to play basketball?" Can you really blame Dot for not answering?

While we're on the subject of clumsy exposition, here's a plot summary: Dot has recently been taken in by a troubled family. Her adoptive sister and classmate Nina (Elisha Cuthbert) is a sourpuss cheerleader whose issues include a bad body image and a potentially homicidal, if well-founded, rage at her father (Martin Donovan). He's a successful architect whose own home - brace yourself for the irony - seriously lacks livability. In fact, it's downright gloomy in there, and not just for the apparent scarcity of light bulbs. Mom (Edie Falco) has gently lowered herself into a stupor of painkillers, and dad has turned to Nina for sexual gratification.

Of course, Dot gets an earful of all this. And she talks about it, too. Oh, don't worry. I'm not spoiling anything to say so. See, she talks right to the audience from the beginning - presumably because no self-respecting melodrama of suburban dysfunction would be complete without a voiceover. Dot uses hers to say, for instance, "One day we wake up, and we realize the world sucks. And we suck for being in it." Or to talk about Beethoven, whose music she plays on the family piano and with whom she professes an affinity: "I imagine his mind must have been the loudest silence in history."

If it seems too snarky to suggest that history's next-loudest silence may be that of the indifference this movie will induce in theater audiences, you must understand that the prospect of further discussing the details of its plot is simply too unbearable. I really think it might be better for everyone if I just fill up the remaining space with a bitchy attitude.

For starters, even a young film reviewer who grew up in suburban Connecticut, where this movie badly pretends to be set, knows a goth poseur when he sees one. "The Quiet" tries to cultivate a titillating air of pervy mystery but then chickens out and gets all archly confessional. If it makes you feel creepy, it's only in that "maybe tell the therapist instead of telling me" kind of way. It was written by the team of Abdi Nazemian and Micah Schraft, two men who apparently share an interest in behaving like precocious adolescent lesbians not yet recovered from various childhood traumas. Did nobody at their Sundance Lab workshop have the guts to tell these guys that's just not cool?

Instead, apparently, they said, "Boys, do we have the director for you." Her name is Jamie Babbit, and her most notable credits include "But I'm a Cheerleader"; MTV's "Undressed"; a few episodes of "Gilmore Girls"; and, due for release next year, the admittedly promisingly titled "Itty Bitty Titty Committee." Babbit's work here seems to consist of straining for lyricism; the camera solemnly tracks around through a thick haze of blue diffusion (I'm serious, people: light bulbs), moving to the music of beloved indie mopeuse Cat Power - and, of course, Beethoven. And not since "A Clockwork Orange" has that composer's glory been so shockingly debauched on the big screen. Oh, no, not really. If only. What to tell poor Babbit? Even Kubrick couldn't hold an audience on a grim predilection for pretty girls, violence and a little bit of the old Ludwig Van. CV

Comment on this story | Return to top