Affliction

Directed by Paul Schrader
Written by Paul Schrader from the Russel Banks novel Starring Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek, James Coburn, Mary Beth Hurt
USA, 1998
Rated R (violence, language, adult themes)

"I get to feeling like a whipped dog some days.
Some night I’m gonna bite back, I swear it."
-Wade Whitehouse

C

LAUGHABLE ANGST
Affliction, as the title may imply, is a rather depressing movie. A labor of love for all involved, it is about violence- violence instilled in men by their fathers, and the suffering women in the middle of it all who just have the misfortune to "love them." Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte, who also acted as executive producer on the film) is a character ruined by his childhood, by his ceaselessly drunk father, Glen (James Coburn). He is a policeman and the signs of his affliction are showing more than ever now; so much rage and chaos is piling up on top of him: his relationship with his daughter is strained by divorce, the death of Even Twombley involves him in a possible murder case, his mother has died, he has just been fired, and his darned tooth is aching.

Wade feels like a failure: he has aspired all his adult life to give his daughter Jill a good childhood because he had a terrible one. He thinks he has failed, however, because his marriage to his ex-wife Lillian (Mary Beth Hurt) went down the tubes, and now what remains between Jill and him are clumsy gestures and uncomfortable conversations. Jill finds no sense of safety or security when she is with him, and he senses that, and the fact that he doesn’t know how to provide this happiness for his child is killing him. He is going to take matters into his own hands and get custody of Jill, but his anxiety over the divorce settlements seems to be only a subconscious plan to get Jill for himself and prove to himself and everyone that he can be a good father. He only further tears the ties between Jill and him, though, and his ex-wife knows his unending pursuit of their daughter is but an imagined competition between him and herself.

When Jack Hewitt, a friend of Wade’s, is hired to supervise a wealthy man, Even Twombley, in shooting deer, Twombley ends up dead. In actuality, Twombley accidentally slipped and shot himself, but Wade turns it into a violent case, imagining possible third parties and schemes Jack Hewitt may have used to kill Twombley. Wade’s nature is to think in complex, savage ways; to overreact.

When Wade and his fiancee Margie (Sissy Spacek) decide to visit his father, they find the little house without heat; cold from the snow outside. Wade discovers that his mother is dead; (grotesquely) she died from the cold and she could’ve survived if her husband, Glen, hadn’t been drunk. The only reason he survived was because he was drinking alcohol. Wade doesn’t want his father to live alone so Margie and him move in with Glen. Margie becomes what Wade’s mother was to Glen before her death: an object to harass.

The only considerably stable person in the Whitehouse family is Rolfe, Wade’s brother (Willem Dafoe). Because he was not Glen’s punching bag of choice, he has not been totally devastated by his childhood. He has learned to move forward, instead of the backward and stagnant routes Wade is taking in his life.

Paul Schrader, who adapted Russell Bank’s acclaimed novel and also directed the film, uses narration- distracting, out-of-place, self-consciously melodramatic statements made by Rolfe at the beginning and end of the film. Editor Jay Rabonowitz cuts between present day and flashbacks of ugly, drunken domestic abuse in an effective way. We learn that Wade had a severely scarring childhood in which his helpless mother, brother Rolfe, and him were tormented by his low-life father. These scenes are especially potent.

The character of Glen Whitehouse is this film’s epitome of the devil. There is absolutely no redeeming quality in him- he is The Blackness. Wade is not entirely broken at the beginning of the film, but we see his deterioration, which picks up speed in the middle of the film and then becomes more rapid. By the end of the movie, Wade is a mirror image of his father- an unfeeling, cold, violent man whose life is a joke covered in alcohol and tears and angst. James Coburn is extremely sly and stirring as the drunken father Glen, but he has nothing really to work from. His character is a slapdash stereotype. Nick Nolte’s character is much better written because there is a streak of possible redemption in the beginning of his journey downward, and even though he ends up in a hopeless mess of self-loathing and anarchy, we get to see his harrowing descent. Nick Nolte is at his phenomenal best, and when finally, he is at the peak of his fury, we feel his wrath. We relate to his anger when he screams about his toothache, but he takes it one step further and pulls out that tooth with pliers. Glen, even in the flashbacks, is without hope and is basically put in the film as an obstacle Wade must face, a symbol of all the abusive fathers in the world.

Affliction is moving during the final quarter of the film, but the earlier portion doesn’t seem to work or involve you. The death of Twombley is a disposable subplot, another brick to add on the wall that separates Wade from sanity. The film ends like some commercial begging for the world to stop the abuse cycle. The message is important, but it is made too obvious so that it makes the film seem preachy. In the end, the whipped-dog Wade bites back- at the women in his life (his mother, Margie, Lillian, and Jill), his father, and himself.

By Andrew Chan

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