WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

Factotum

(Transcript)
Originally broadcast August 25, 2006

	Milos Stehlik

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Charles Bukowski has held fascination for European filmmakers for a long time. French filmmaker Barbet Schroeder made his Barfly and Italian director Marco Ferreri directed Tales of Ordinary Madness. Neither film was entirely successful. What attracts European filmmakers to Bukowski is undoubtedly the bleakly realistic world of society outcasts, living on the edge—the grey zone between normalcy and madness. But Bukowski’s literary universe resists being objectified when dramatized and filmed. It loses texture, its American-ness which the European filmmakers, outsiders and interlopers, end up depicting much the same way one would film a documentary about animals in a zoo. They may do strange things, but let’s face it, a gorilla scratch is a gorilla scratch a gorilla scratch—after watching it a while, it gets boring.

The Norwegian filmmaker Bent Hamer is the first filmmaker to successfully figure out this Bukowski world of alcohol and poetry. His film, Factotum, is pretty terrific. It was shot mostly in the St. Paul and Minneapolis area. Hamer casts it well: Matt Dillon, Lili Taylor, Marisa Tomei, Fisher Stevens. He focuses on Bukowski’s plot, what there is of it, and doesn’t try to embellish it with a false sense of tragedy. This deadpan approach allows the feeling of disconnectedness to evolve from the characters and their broken lives and relationships. Moreover, in Factotum, Hamer understands that a sense of the absurd and irony is what gives the Bukowski world its unique feel.

Hank Chinaski, played by Dillon, is the archetypal Bukowski character: a drifter consumer by alcohol and writing. He lives off a succession of short term jobs: delivering ice, working in a pickle factory, sorting auto parts, dusting statues. Most of them he loses because he either doesn’t show up for work or he is too drunk when he does. More often, he disappears for an extended workday break at a bar. He tells one employer: “All I want to do is get my check and get drunk. Now that might not sound noble, but it’s my choice.”

He lives with Jan, played by Lili Taylor, where he was forced to move after he was evicted from his own flat. Then he moves onto Laura, played by Marisa Tomei. But it’s his on-again off-again relationship with Jan that’s clearly the emotional fulcrum of his life—one that he’s unable to sustain. She too, is a drunk, and that is the only image of him which she can sustain. When Hank briefly hits a winning streak by running a betting service with his co-worker, she finds it difficult to accept him as anything else besides the alcoholic he is. Hamer is also careful to capture both sides of Hank’s character. He leaves Jan as she is in the middle of an enormous hangover, but leaves her half his cash. On the other hand, he is also clearly capable of being a brute. At one point he backhands her and throws her off a barstool. On the other hand, we feel his suffering as he tries to make it from his bed to reach for the first beer.

Yet the brilliance of Bent Hamer’s direction is that he refuses to get trapped in this closed world of booze. For his part, Dillon never overplays it, not even for a moment. Instead, both know that there is a world beyond booze, the inner world from where the poetry and the wounds are buried.

More than anything else, Chinaski—and Bukowski—were writers. The rigorousness this writing demands, the discipline that drives the writing, beyond and above all, is the central point, as it was in Bukowski’s life. This steel-clad, resolute center of Bukowski’s life—the “work”—as in the life of so many other artists makes the women, jobs, family, even alcohol secondary to what he MUST do: write.

This is in no small part helped by the fact that Dillon has a good feel for Bukowski’s poetry and his use of language.

It is this language, and this poetry, which gives the character of Chinaski and of Factotum its dignity, its humanity, its resilience.

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.

Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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