A Landscape of Pain
Paul Schrader brilliantly films a Russell Banks novel

AFFLICTION
With Nick Nolte, James Coburn, Sissy Spacek, Willem Dafoe
Screenplay by Paul Schrader, from the novel by Russell Banks
Directed by Paul Schrader

IN MOVIES LIKE Taxi Driver, Hardcore, American Gigolo, Cat People, The Last Temptation of Christ, Mishima and now in Affliction, the writer and director Paul Schrader has willfully assailed us with disquieted characters who occupy a painful, corrupt, almost hellish moral and psychological landscape, and who try to transcend their human natures (whatever they might be) in their search - desperate and usually in vain - for love.

Schrader claims that all of his movies are love stories, albeit ones that end unhappily for the inextricable lovers. Throughout the past quarter century, his films have never quite lost their candid and sometimes awkward emotional edge. They remain paradoxically composed and filled with an anguish that simmers just below a funereal surface. Schrader has refined his style to the point where his deliberate narrative rhythm and gloomy emotional cadence seem to possess an unearthly tranquillity. His movies feel almost surreally tense and exciting, even when they're somewhat less than successful.

In Affliction, the director achieves a level of dramatic filmmaking unlike anything he's even come close to achieving before. It's a mature and elegiac work, perfectly paced and quietly profound - a confluence of directing, writing and acting that represents a new direction for its maker. And it's a haunting human drama, with moments of everyday sadness that well up like a memory you can't escape.

At the center of Affliction is Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte), a man who, as his younger brother Rolf (Willem Dafoe) explains, lives life on the edge of his emotions, and so has no perspective to retreat to. Sanguine on the surface, slightly roguish and insecure, he's a lit fuse burning slowly down to its incendiary source. He's also a still, plaintive, tragic figure, and after he holds up traffic as a crossing guard at a school, his arms become paralyzed in cruciform as a line of waiting cars honk impatiently to be let go.

Wade is the toy sheriff of a small, snowy, isolated town in upstate New Hampshire, where he also works for Gordon LaRiviere, a fastidious French Canadian who's a well-to-do businessman and town selectman, thus making him Wade's double boss. He's recently divorced, his brittle ex-wife (Mary Beth Hurt) is remarried, his inquisitive daughter says she loves him but still would rather not be with him, and his steady, 40-something waitress girlfriend (Sissy Spacek) does all she can to keep him feeling grounded and secure.

Finally, there's his father (James Coburn), who lives on the outskirts of town. In grainy flashbacks to Wade's youth, Pop Whitehouse is a bellicose alcoholic who physically and mentally abuses his two sons. In the present, he's a rather doddering and decrepit old man, still confrontational and still an alcoholic. When his wife dies he moves in with Wade, setting the son up for a Pyrrhic victory over his long-time abuser.

All of that would be enough. But Affliction has another element that deepens Wade's malaise and gives Schrader a chance to fill in the vista of his drama. On the first day of deer-hunting season, old Evan Twombley falls into a snow bank and shoots himself with his own rifle as his friend looks on from a short distance. Or is that what really happened? Wade isn't convinced, and with some suggestion from Rolf - a college history professor more interested in true-or-false than right-or-wrong - he begins to investigate a conspiracy involving land, unions, kickbacks and moral decay.

It's fascinating to see how two different directors - Schrader with Affliction, and Atom Egoyan with The Sweet Hereafter - have captured so similarly the frigid world of random cause and effect of the novelist Russell Banks, from whose books both films were taken. Affliction is the richer experience by the more seasoned artist, who gives you a sense of the fullness of this world and the old, tense, complex relationships among its characters.

He's helped enormously by acting so natural and distilled - something new in a Schrader film - that you almost feel like a voyeur for watching. Coburn, who is monumentally cruel and menacing, gives a performance unparalleled in his career. But the throbbing, aching heart of Affliction is Nick Nolte, whose precise, contemplative acting immediately suggests the preordained tragedies that attend Wade between his passionate-cum-futile bouts of moral enterprise. In movies like Affliction and last year's Afterglow, Nolte has begun to develop a body of work about men just beyond mid-life: The sort of thing that Michael Douglas does in slick, empty Hollywood entertainment movies, Nolte does infinitely better in small, serious, highly rewarding dramas.

In all of his films, Schrader creates worlds where people are virtually helpless to move beyond their emotional or physical destiny. Affliction is a stark, rueful addition to that canon. But unlike his other films, which take place in busy big cities, and which so often build to a frenzy, Affliction remains surprisingly serene and nervously realistic.

Toward the end of the film, when the two Whitehouse men talk about their father, the younger, college-educated brother, who's glad to have escaped small-town life, and who describes himself as "a careful child and a careful adult," tells Wade: "At least I was never afflicted by that man's violence." Wade chuckles, takes a swig of whiskey, and replies: "That's what you think." It's a moment so simple and profound that it threatens to pass unnoticed, except that Schrader and Nolte give it all the weight it needs to knock you out.

Life Goes On
The Sweet Hereafter is a homily for a random and unfathomable world.

THE SWEET HEREAFTER
With Ian Holm, Bruce Greenwood
Screenplay by Atom Egoyan, from the novel by Russell Banks
Directed by Atom Egoyan

THE NEW FILM BY ATOM EGOYAN, The Sweet Hereafter, is unquestionably a work of art: sad, dense, slow, ponderous, and constantly searching for a balance between the mundane and the profound. Egoyan, the Canadian who also made The Adjuster and Exotica, seems interested in stories about people whose lives are linked by fate. He has a unique style that turns the Earth into a disturbing, quiescent place, where silence and formality mask deep pain and horrible secrets.

The dialogue in The Sweet Hereafter, which is about the aftermath of a fatal school bus accident, comes in three varieties. Much of the time people speak socially acceptable clichés to one another. Sometimes they simply utter pieces of philosophy that need no context. At other times they articulate their anguish in confessional monologues that border on the poetic. Egoyan likes to move his camera slowly toward an actor's face during a speech, as if to increase the level of intimacy as the words unfold. He forces his actors to speak deliberately, pausing between lines even in conversations with one another. It makes you feel like they all could cease to exist at any time, even in mid-sentence.

There's certainly a vision here, and a serious attempt to explore the complexities of life and death, grief and forgiveness, parental love and filial rebellion. But the effect of The Sweet Hereafter is more intellectual than emotional, and it's almost too easy to draw lines from one theme or irony to another. It's the sort of movie you simply have to decide is rich and moving rather than transparent and cold. See it if you care to, then talk about it afterwards. But don't go expecting a revelation.

Set in a small rural Canadian town, The Sweet Hereafter begins with the camera gliding across a room and coming upon a deceptively tranquil image: In a bed, blanketed by white sheets and sunlight, lies a mother, father and child, all three naked and asleep. We learn later that the man is Mitchell Stephens, an attorney, and that the morning's repose turned terrifying when the little girl, apparently bitten by black widow spiders hidden among the sheets, almost died from the poison.

Now, some 30 years later, Stephens (Ian Holm) is combing the town of Sam Dent, B.C., to round up families who want to join a lawsuit against the school bus company he hopes to prove killed their children through negligence. His own daughter--the one bitten by the spiders--has grown up to be an HIV-positive drug addict who calls him on his cell phone when she needs money or reassurance. So he understands what it means to lose a child, although he only tells that to the townspeople when it's absolutely necessary to win their empathy or their confidence.

In Sam Dent, the adults are all in different stages of grief. The well-liked driver of the school bus, whom everyone knows did nothing wrong, is tormented with guilt because so many of her cherubs died in the accident. Billy (Bruce Greenwood), a lonely widower, wants nothing to do with the lawsuit: He was following the bus, waving to his children in the back seat, when they all went over the embankment and into a frozen lake. He's having a discreet love affair with the married Risa, who lost her learning-disabled child in the crash.

Finally, there's Sam and Mary Burnell, whose mature teenage daughter, Nicole, survived the crash and is now a paraplegic. Nicole's father loves his talented musician/daughter--so much that the two of them go to the barn at night, where he lights a row of candles and caresses her in what seems to be a mutual attraction. But now he wants money, of which he has very little, and he's counting once again on Nicole to give him what he wants when she testifies.

In addition to what it says about regret, suffering and the immutability of death, The Sweet Hereafter is a mannered soap opera about the infidelities that go on behind the picket fences of a closely knit town of surprisingly worldly people. That's a tired story, one we might have done without, and Egoyan finds nothing new aside from telling it in his trademark style, which is cool and analytical. Nor does Egoyan have anything much to say about lawyers beyond the usual cynicism, except perhaps that they, too, are human beings who have painful stories of their own to forget.

The Sweet Hereafter is gripping in those moments where Egoyan strikes a balance between humanity and his art. He does it most effectively in the characters of Billy and Nicole, the only two people in Sam Dent who seem willing to accept that accidents simply happen, and that sometimes no one is to blame. Holm gives an able, if funereal, performance as the lawyer who knows just how to persuade people to cash in on their anger. The movie's climax is so good that it made me begin to concoct better ways to get there.

At his best, in Exotica, Egoyan tells a strong central story laid over with an effective, even erotic melancholy. At his most typical, in The Adjuster, he's just plain heavy-handed and dull. The Sweet Hereafter falls somewhere in between. It's a movie of serious purpose that seems to get lost in its artistic design, sometimes haunting and sad, but more often contrived and unsatisfying, like a homily for a random and unfathomable world.