Critics reviews

Schrader has always been better as a writer and a critic than as a dramatist, which is why his most successful work has either been published in film journals or directed by Martin Scorsese. His flat, awkward staging diminishes some good performances—particularly those of Nolte and a welcome Sissy Spacek—and Willem Dafoe's leaden narration underlines each theme with a magic marker.

Overwrought metaphors abound (a tooth aches to be pulled), yet Affliction is, nonetheless, a film that haunts. At the heart of the film is a pained performance by Nolte, whose Wade suffers fools gladly as he toils through a snowy landscape crumbling beneath his feet.

Because most of the acting is authentic and powerful (especially that of Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek, and Jim True), the source (a Russell Banks novel) is more than respectable, and the subject—an all-around fuckup (Nolte) in a dying New England town becomes even more fucked-up—and winter setting are unrelentingly grim, one has to admire writer-director Paul Schrader for having the guts to make this picture. But I found it more punishing than edifying.

Nolte's performance is powerful and satisfyingly cinematic; unfortunately, the rest of the picture has not been successfully adapted to the new medium. Schrader works here, as The Sweet Hereafter's Atom Egoyan did last year, from a novel by Russell Banks, but where Egoyan's camera let emotions bleed out from the images as much as from the ravaged worlds of his actors, Schrader is still a writer at heart who does not sufficiently appreciate the unique needs and capabilities of the camera.

The great pleasure of watching Nolte on-screen has to do with the way he combines the exuberant, sweeping physicality of the great masculine stars like Burt Lancaster with the subtleties of a fine actor. It seems he can put his shambling, he-man bearishness to whatever effect he chooses — comic, tender or frightening. In "Affliction," Nolte's body seems to be a clock winding down before our eyes, a burden he's dragging around, a repository for each new resentment.

Did I mention how well-constructed Affliction is? Disaster has been lurking all movie long but things fall apart with a frightening suddenness... Affliction's ending reminds some people of the small apocalypse with which Andrei Tarkovsky closed out The Sacrifice but, like everything else in this nuanced film, it's rueful and distanced, understated rather than grandiose.