Overall Rating
 Awesome: 33.33%
Worth A Look: 38.89%
Just Average: 22.22%
Pretty Crappy: 0%
Sucks: 5.56%
4 reviews, 30 user ratings
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| Affliction |
by sean
"See it at matinee prices, maybe"
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I was in a really good mood, but I was bored. I decided to see what was playing. I chose this movie.I am no longer in a good mood.
That pretty much sums up this movie. If Schraeder was trying to make it depressing, he failed, though. I was not depressed by the movie. I was disappointed and left feeling unfulfilled.
The three principle actors, Nolte, Spacek, and Coburn, were all great. [Although Coburn wasn't convincing as a younger version of himself, that's more a makeup flaw. I know what he looked like when he was younger, I've seen THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN.]
Willem Dafoe, however, was most assuredly *not* great. His role, the least difficult in the film, was also the one that was most essential to get right, and for an actor as great as he is (there are also references, intentional or not, to previous roles of his that provided me with a little comic relief) to play a role as badly as he did was sad.
And now we move onto the story. I'll say that I've never been a fan of Schraeder; the only movie he was involved in that I thought was good was TAXI DRIVER, and I feel that too is flawed (or at least dated). However, the dialogue in this movie had a simple grace to it, for the most part. [For the record, he deserved the Adapted Screenplay nod over THIN RED LINE, much as I loved that movie.] And his directing, I must admit, was very good. I think he did exactly what he intended to do. But I don't think his intentions were right.
For one thing, the movie is slow. Because of this, the climax is all but cut from the movie. (There is a smaller climax, but the climax that we all know is coming is shown briefly.) And, for a slow movie, Nolte's transformation is very abrupt. For the whole movie, he is a little on-edge, but he suddenly becomes a madman with about twenty minutes to go. Though everything else in the movie has been building to it, he himself has not, and the movie suffers a little more.
[Note: the following paragraph is somewhat spoiler-ish]
And there is an entire subplot that needs re-working. It involves a hunting accident that Nolte suspects is not an accident. Now, I sat watching and suddenly realized, "Wow ... that's a really cool thing, because you're supposed to assume he's right, and then they're gonna use it as an example of how nuts he is, that's he's just a paranoid fucker." But then, the evidence piles up. More and more things point to it not being an accident. Dafoe's character inexplicably pushes Nolte more and more towards thinking it was not an accident. So the audience *must* believe it is, simply because it would be silly to devote that much time and so many characters to something that's not an accident. But it was. They said as much. Suddenly, out of the blue, it was an accident, and the movie suffers a little more for trying to blindside us and making us sympathize more with Nolte, something I don't believe we should have been able to do. [Being an abusive, worthless drunk.]I make one final plea to any and every filmmaker: Please stop adapting Russell Banks. Leave them in book form, they're better that way.
link directly to this review at https://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/review.php?movie=1198&reviewer=18
originally posted: 02/12/99 01:20:07
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USA
19-Feb-1999 (R)
UK
N/A
Australia
30-Sep-1999 (MA)
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