Factotum

Factotum is a quantum movie. Or rather in its efforts to depict the chaotic life of radical writer Charles Bukoska's autobiographical alter ego Henry Chinaski, the paradoxes and inherent uncertainties of quantum theory seem an apt metaphor.

Hank, like Bukowska is a dedicated alcoholic drifting indifferently through any odd jobs he can con his way into then disdainfully neglect until he is inevitably 'canned', spend the pay-off on booze and then ricochet randomly off to repeat the process elsewhere. It is as if, like the theory, through his alcoholic haze Hank sometimes has an idea of where he's going but isn't really clear where he actually is. Alternatively he sometimes has sense of where he is, but none at all of where he's going. Like a particle with no discernible fixed identity, he bounces randomly around the world colliding with people, places and events of which he is part, but in which he makes no stable intentional intervention and to which he displays no discernible interest. This process is constantly re-fuelled by a 24/7 intake of alcohol and nicotine. If this sounds incredible then we should remember that the real Bukowska's body survived this punishing regime for 74 years until his death in 1994.

If this were all, then Norwegian Director Bent Hamer's film would not be the absorbing work that it is. For through this fog of alcohol shines the dim light of Hank's determination to write. Not in the least for its rewards or recognition, but because it forms the nucleus of his fragile identity. And through the excellent use of Hank as narrator, the stark, clinical, austere quality of Bukowski's writing emerges. This is the poetry of skid row, the unsentimental, unflinching account of life at the margins of normal society about which Hank is entirely indifferent and Bukowsa himself viewed with contempt. There is a brief, doomed, flirtation with the idea that we might have some control over our destiny through Hank's initially successful foray into betting the horses. Racing I guess offers the illusion that even if God plays with dice, with a bit of determined effort a man might beat the odds. Of course this ends in failure - the house always wins in the end.

The paradox of quantum theory is that the precise and rigorous lucidity of the language of science, expresses a view of the world of matter that is devoid of certainty and inherently rests upon mere probabilities. Similarly Hank's island of lucidity is the drive to write; to create a meaningful response to a meaningless world. His behaviour is as random and unpredictable as the chaotic, senseless events of the world that provoke it. Yet an urge to coherence emerges through his irresistible drive to write about that world. He has simple appetites: alcohol, nicotine and sex and no moral, emotional scruple gets in the way of satisfying them. He is drawn into transitory friendships and fragile sexual relationships by the basic need to drink, smoke and have sex. The only relationship he has with any semblance of continuity and personal satisfaction is with fellow alcoholic Jan.They share these basics needs and arrive at a kind a stable modus vivendi where they are fully met without having to wander about the world hoping to pick them up in a run down bar. Jan's predilection for leaping into bed with every random bum she takes a fancy to, the dirtier the better, eventually fractures this sex-of-convenience arrangement. Here Hank packs his bag and leaves with the air of a guy popping out for a night's bowling rather than walking away from the only half-way stable relationship he's ever had. This fictional account mirrors Bukowska's own 10 year relationship with Janet Cooney-Baker also a long-term alcoholic who eventually lost her fight with the booze in 1962.

Hank lives in a down-beat, dead-beat world where his holy trinity of physical appetites are the only distraction from that world to which he is always, by choice, an outsider. The film is visually and aurally dark in tone. Yet through this, Hamer's screenplay, leaning I suspect heavily on Bukowska's own writing, cuts clinically and strikingly like a surgeon's knife making an incision to open up to the unflinching eye, the diseased or damaged part of life that may need surgical repair or excision. This is writing honed to a razor-sharp edge that is simply startling and despite inducing a sense of recoil, exercises a strange fascination. If I have a regret, it is that more might have been made of the occasional moments of darkly ironic humour flashing like flinty sparks out of the sheer absurdity of the many irredeemably hopeless situations Hank stumbles into. I don't now Bukowska's work but occasionally in this film Hank's blurred perspective seems to be a weary "so what?" in response to the world: at others there is a flash of rebellion that engages us much more.If there is much of Hank Chinaski to like we find it here.

Matt Dillon is a revelation and has never for my money done anything remotely in this league before. Lili Taylor is equally convincing as bed and bottle-mate Jan and even manages to tease a kind of pathetic tenderness out of the role. Marisa Tomei is effective as one of Hank's random, ricochet lays who is locked into a very weird foursome with two female friends and an older man who manipulates sex from all three by funding their booze and basic needs.

Factotum is no nice night out at the movies. Its darkness is as heavy as it context would imply. Yet it is constantly absorbing and thought-provoking. It is immensely successful in portraying the world and experience of an autobiographical character based upon a writer both Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre called "America's greatest poet" This 'factotum', jack-of-all-trades, late in his writing life, by all accounts became master of one. Off-the-wall, in-the-gutter but cinematically on-the-money.

Zettel

I saw the earlier Kitchen Stories by director Bent Hamer in a cinema in Berlin in 2004, which was an absolute delight. When I heard he was going to direct an adaptation of Bukowsky's work, I was surprised, given the very different material he handled in the rural Nordic settings in Scandinavia. So it seemed an odd choice to direct a movie like this, but it turns out to be a very refreshing and welcome take at "The Bukowsky Case".

Essentially, this film is about the despairs of alcoholism, frighteningly brought to life by an array of simply stunning performances. Matt Dillon as Henry Chinasky is literally sweating alcohol. His face is red and swollen, he looks absolutely horrible. Once handsome but now an absolute has-been, who's sole interests are booze, gambling, sex and writing. People don't interest him at all, including the women, sex is all that interests him, if only mildly. Lily Taylor is a perfect match as his female interest and fellow barfly. But the real kudos are for Marisa Tomei in a relatively minor role but she really burns off the screen, alcohol set on fire. A real treat.

It might not be a typical Bukowski-movie, in the sense of his sometimes brash, aggressive, perhaps even typical direct American style, so fans of his work might judge this movie very differently and perhaps argue this is not the real spirit of Bukowsky put to the screen. But director Hamer handles it with such warmth, humor, sly wit and at times very sharp observations that you really shouldn't care about this. Judge it on its own merits.

Camera Obscura --- 9/10

Factotum means "jack of all trades", and Matt Dillon interprets the role of a drunk trying nothing but to survive from day to day. He has no ambition, he doesn't have to compete with anyone, he makes part of no desirable demographic group and doesn't want a white picket fence.

He drinks, smokes, womanizes :), and writes all the time. His writing (much like Charles Bukowski's, the author of the book this movie is based on, dead in 1994 at 74 years old) is based on his own life and feelings and seems compulsional: he needs to write more than he needs to be read.

Now, about the movie. It is rather slow paced, close to boring. Matt Dillon plays very well his role and he has never looked and felt like Bruce Campbell in his life. When the movie ended, though, I felt I have been enriched somehow. A lot of the modern pressure of proving something, having a home, getting a job, the things that we start to think define us, all these things have no power on Matt Dillon's character. Of course, in Romania such a guy would have starved a long time ago, but still... A bit like The Big Lebowski, it shows that there are alternate lifestyles right next to us. You can make the choice to lose women, friends, family, but go all the way in the direction of your choosing. And after all, this is what Factotum is all about.

Bottom line: you need to be in the mood for a slow film, but it is worth it.

First, my only gripes with the film are about authenticity. And they're just because I'm a huge fan of Charles Bukowski. I've never thought of Matt Dillon as a "great" actor. But I thought Dillon's role as Bukowski was just okay. I almost can't quite put my finger on it. He looks a decent bit Like Buk, but his actual performance seems almost too much like a mediocre impression. I don't know. It's just not very natural or convincing or something. I'm not an acting coach. He just didn't click with me as Bukow...*ahem*, Chinaski, anyway.

As a whole the film just didn't capture the feel of the Bukowski novel. It seemed too clean for some reason. The whole film just seemed a lot more tame than the literature. His writing captures this great sense of adventure, danger, and a frequent raw vulgarity. But also, it has a very artful heart to it. The movie missed this entirely, in my opinion.

But believe it or not though, I still think it's a good movie. Outside the actual interpretation of Charles Bukowski's novel, it's still fun watch, with generally good performances, and a phenomenal story to have been based on.

If you remember that Bent Hamer made the little film about a Forties Scandinavian household efficiency program called Kitchen Stories, you'll be partially prepared for the dry, sardonic style of this follow-up feature, the Charles Bukowski-based epic of seedy living Factotum, in which Matt Dillon gives a stylized, restrained performance as the authorial stand-in, Hank Chinaski, and Lili Taylor and Marisa Tomei seamlessly slide into the roles of Hank's alcoholic girlfriends Jan and Laura. Bulked up with a zombie stare, stifled voice and shambling walk, Dillon is very good, if, due partly to script limitations, not as compelling as Mickey Rourke in Barbet Schroeder's Barfly. Even overweight and horribly dressed Dillon is still far too handsome to resemble the pockmarked and ugly real-life Bokowski, but you can't fault good looks in a leading man, and the film is dominated by Dillon's character, who's in every scene, his narrative voice brought in to move the episodic plot along and provide Bukowski's insistent commentary on life as he sees it.

Those episodes are all we get, and apart from brief writing and longer romantic interludes, they mainly concern a long round of short-lived jobs -- sorting pickles in a pickle factory, boxing brake shoes, dusting statues, driving a cab (a hard-on's no danger to the driver, the instructor says, but sneezing is), assembling bike parts, and so on, from which Hank is unfailingly soon fired for drunkenness or lateness, insubordination or other misdemeanors -- whereupon he goes back to writing, drinking, and sex -- which latter, Jan tells him, is no good when he gets successful as he does for a while playing the horses. (There's none of the post office sorting job Bukowski did for a long time.) For Bukowski and his alter ego being a seedy loser is a thing carried off with such chutzpah that it's sexy -- and drinking and sex are equally close ways to feed the libido. There are plenty of the ten-cent aphorisms the tireless writer worked at, and there's a plug for the Black Sparrow Press that eventually started to keep and publish his endlessly mailed out submissions and today still survives off maintaining the slob genius' oœvre in public hands.

Bokowski appeals to the young, the easily impressed, the hard drinking, and those who like the pithy sayings and ignore the arrested development. For those of bourgeois mentality and upbringing there's a certain imperishably tonic thrill in watching a man who's been down so long it looks like up; who can tell the employer who's just fired him to give him his severance check immediately so he can hurry up and get drunk; for whom no flophouse or flat is too seedy, no bibulous girlfriend a worse drunk than he. How liberating it might be not to care about losing everything, knowing that since paper and pen are nearly free you'll never stop writing: or if you lose heart for a minute or two, a dip into the works of some other writer will encourage you in the belief that you can do better. Bokowski was a tough one.

Matt Dillon is Irish enough to have seen something of the hard drinking life himself. One senses that he knows whereof he speaks and can convey the alcoholic lifestyle without irony or melodrama. There's nothing quite like Lili Taylor coming out in her underwear to fix Hank a meal. His request is for another round of pancakes. "There's still no butter," she says. "Well, they'll be extra crisp," he replies.

In a smaller but still choice role Marisa Tomei is well disguised as another drunken lady Hank goes home with, finding that she lives with a flaky French millionaire called Pierre (Didier Flamand) with a little yacht and dreams of composing an opera. Hank's been taken off so many two bit jobs being fired has no sting left for him. Bukowski's persona is impenetrable and he's a simple survivor: he's almost utterly resistant to the forces of change his wayward lifestyle would activate in lesser beings and hence, unlike the downward spiraling drunk so movingly played by Nick Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, Bukowski's Hank in Dillon's performance cannot build toward pathos or true depth. As suggested, this film doesn't develop its sequences and relationships as thoroughly as Barfly, for which Bukowski himself wrote the screenplay, giving it a continuity and focus Factotum's more cobbled-together script doesn't quite muster.

There's something condescending and cultish in the European cultivation of the Bukowski myth in which this is another short chapter. Factotum is an occasionally amusing, at moments laugh-out-loud kind of movie that's well served by all the principals and by director Hamer's dry wit and restraint, but after the desultory and boring stretches have eventually started to pile up you may begin to say: So what? and wish the fresh novel feel of the early scenes could've been better sustained throughout. Not to fault the editing, but mightn't a native's keener ear for the rhythms of the dialogue have kept the flow going better? This is one to see if you like Matt Dillon or Bukowski; otherwise, save your time.