Factotum
Bent Hamer (2005)
Although his latest film O’Horten is likeable, Bent Hamer tends to bring out its eccentric qualities in a slightly too emphatic way. Kristin Asbjørnsen’s score at the start of this adaptation of Charles Bukowski’s novel seemed to signal a similar approach – and because, on this occasion, Hamer was dealing with an American subject, and directing an American cast, I wasn’t hopeful. I was wrong (and condescending to assume that Hamer would be out of his comfort zone in a non-Norwegian setting). As I’ve not read Bukowski, I can’t be sure that Hamer shows an intuitive understanding of the material but the rhythm and tone of the picture suggest that he does. (Hamer did the screenplay with Jim Stark, who also produced.) He certainly displays a deft, naturally off-centre touch in getting over the masochistic humour that I’m assuming is essential to the piece.
Bukowski’s novel, published in 1975, is set in Los Angeles in 1944. The film’s setting is updated to the present day but is presumably still LA. Matt Dillon plays Henry (Hank) Chinaski, a would-be writer, as yet unpublished. Chinaski is the alter ego of Bukowski, who was forty-nine years old when (in 1969) he left his job as a filing clerk in the Los Angeles post office to write full time, at the invitation of the Black Sparrow press publisher John Martin. (Chinaski was also the protagonist of the Barbet Schroeder film Barfly, made in 1987, in which Mickey Rourke played the role and for which Bukowski himself wrote the screenplay.) Chinaski writes, drifts from one job to another, drinks, smokes and sleeps with women. His main relationship in Factotum is with Jan. She, like Chinaski, is broke and a drinker. The film isn’t itself self-indulgent but it taps into the enjoyable aspects of deadbeat living and the extent to which having no future can allow you to live more completely in the present than someone whose life is better ordered. It’s easy to say this, of course, when you’re on the other side of the screen and not actually living like the people on it. But Bent Hamer and Matt Dillon very skilfully create a kinship between Chinaski and the audience: we partake of and can feel what Chinaski finds addictive in the texture of his world – the smoky fug of bars and small rooms, the warmth of red neon lights. And although we experience this vicariously, the film suggests that – as a writer – so does Chinaski (although not at a safe distance).
Just as Chinaski’s indigence has a sybaritic side, so his jobs have a split personality: their simplicity can be instantly gratifying before the work quickly turns soul-destroying. One of the shortest-lived is a cleaning job, which involves Chinaski going up and down in a contraption (which moves with a great creaking whine) to brush up, with a kind of sci-fi blue feather duster, the features of an enormous god-like statue of (Sally advises) a Native American figure. He gets fired from this one for drinking during working hours; it’s almost a point of bloody-minded honour to Chinaski to break the rules of the workplace to attend to the things that matter to him like alcohol and cigarettes. (The Radio Times details of the BBC’s screening of Factotum contained an amusingly apposite typo. It appears to have been released in the UK as Factotum – A Man Who Performs Many Jobs. Radio Times rendered this as Factotum – A Man Who Preforms Many Jobs.)
The dialogue has an agreeable defeatist precision and logic. When Chinaski briefly appears at his parents’ home, he suggests to his disapproving father (James Noah) that they go out for a few cocktails. ‘In the middle of the week, when you’ve got no job?’ asks the father. ‘That’s when you need a drink most,’ his son replies. During the time he’s working in a pickle factory, Chinaski and a colleague Manny (Fisher Stevens) start betting, with some success, on the horses. Driving together one day, Manny complains how stressful it is to keep up a successful relationship with a woman because of the domination of sexual demands. ‘Why not get a woman who likes sex and gambling and drinking?’ suggests Chinaski. ‘Who wants a woman like that?’ Manny asks back. The self-loathing in Factotum is specifically masculine and disingenuous (and although Chinaski’s behaviour is entertainingly unforgivable, you may nevertheless despise Jan for putting up with it). In the fine scene at the family home, Chinaski’s mother (Dee Noah) watches the two men she adores – and who loathe each other – with continuous, dumbly smiling love. When Chinaski goes to a bar, calls Jan a cheap slut and floors her with a punch, the violence is upstaged by the scene’s comic punchline. The other men are too weak to intervene or defend her – they sheepishly help Jan to her feet after Chinaski’s left the room.
Matt Dillon speaks unhurriedly. At the start he sounded to be putting on a voice; once the film was underway his line readings made more and more sense. Chinaski seems to be savouring the misery of what he’s saying. Dillon sometimes reminded me of Brando as he got older and heavier – the walk is lumbering but the character’s intelligence seems to be etched into it, and a potential for violence is there too. When Chinaski is negotiating with petty officialdom, Dillon makes his position seem utterly reasonable – and maintains a leisurely calm until he erupts – however unreasonable it actually is. There’s also an unstressed intensity about Dillon’s Chinaski whenever he’s drinking, smoking, having sex or writing – the motors of his existence. It’s a beautiful performance. As Jan, Lili Taylor blooms and wilts very expressively – she can look really rough or, at hopeful moments, radiant. When Chinaski meets up with Jan again and she’s working as a chambermaid, she’s attractively dressed up and together in the uniform. Taylor has a very funny moment when she accompanies Chinaski on an abortive mission to get one of his termination pay checks, her feet are killing her, and she changes from crippling high heels into his too-big-for-her shoes. She and Dillon handle the dialogue brilliantly. There’s a brief interlude in which Chinaski meets another woman, named Laura, in a bar. He then spends time with her in a household presided over by Pierre (Didier Flamand), a yacht-owning composer, who runs what appears to be a mini-harem (its members include the late Adrienne Shelly). Laura is played by Marisa Tomei, whose ability to glamorise the tawdry is a marvel. When Laura and Chinaski head back to her place and call in on a drugstore en route, Tomei reads off the shopping list to the proprietor. It’s like a non-posh variant on an actorly actor reading the phone directory to magical effect.
Trying to rent a room, Chinaski explains to the landlady (not sure who the actress is) that he’s a writer. When she asks if he writes books, he baffles her with the reply, ‘I don’t think I’m ready for a novel yet’. At the end of the film, he can no longer pay the rent but his mail is still going to the apartment block. The landlady opens a letter which turns out to be from John Martin at Black Sparrow, accepting one of Chinaski’s short stories. The landlady pockets the letter with satisfaction. It’s a lovely moment: she shouldn’t have opened his mail but her sense of vindication in having asked that initial, encouraging question of Chinaski is very pleasing. Bent Hamer then cuts to a closing speech from Chinaski expounding, in a tone of euphoric weariness, his philosophy that ‘If you’re going try, go all the way’ and on the life-enhancing properties of writing. It makes for a singular happy ending.
31 July 2009