Directors Index: Schrader, Paul

Paul Schrader's film is an elegy for a life, a thoughtful character study, a surprisingly moving thriller. Willem Dafoe stars as John LeTour, a 40-year-old delivery boy for a high class drug dealer named Ann (Susan Sarandon). Their clients range from the slick but sleazy Swiss man Tis Brooke (Victor Garber) to the lonely, pathetic slob who never leaves his apartment. John has been talking about leaving the business for years, and is now on the cusp of a change: Ann has been saving up to invest in a new cosmetics business and get out of the drug game for good. They are former junkies turned dealers who never planned this line of work for themselves - this stuff just happens. John gets a wake-up call of sorts when he runs into an old flame, Marianne (Dana Delaney), who has been clean for five years and just wants to stay that way. She's not too keen on being around John, though her sister (Jane Adams) and their dying mother still speak of him fondly. Soon, she is reluctantly drawn back toward John like a moth to a flame; will she get burned? There's a sort of a plot involving a detective investigating a drug-involved murder of an honor student in the park, but this film is really about an astonishingly introspective, astrology-inspired, New Age drug dealer who doesn't want his life, has made tenative plans for an alternative future, and just wants to find a way out. Dafoe, tall and gaunt with a face like a skeleton embodying the just the tiniest hint of lasting flesh, embodies this character from the inside-out. Paul Schrader, who wrote and directed, considers this the third in a series of films he's made about alienated night workers. He calls them his "Man in a Room" films because they all involve men who, isolated, must sit or stand in a room and prepare to face the world: Travis Bickle posing in front of the mirror in Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" (1976), which Schrader wrote; Richard Gere getting dressed and contemplating life as a male escort in "American Gigolo" (1980) which Scrader wrote and directed; and now Dafoe, writing page after endless page in journal after journal about how much he wishes he wasn't in the life he's found himself in, and how desperately he wants to get out. "Someone once told me when a drug dealer starts keeping a journal, it's time to get out," John reflects early on. Maybe that someone was right.

Paul Schrader's neo-noir-ish thriller is yet another of his seedy character studies about professional men who go out into the night and apply their unique qualities to a particular vocation. Carter Page III (Woody Harrelson) is the aging, homosexual son of a Southern senator who once investigated Watergate. "Car" as he's known to his friends is something called a "walker," a gentleman who escorts female society types from one place to another. His clients meet weekly for a card game - mostly to engage in gossip and witty one-liners; they include Natalie Van Miter (Lauren Bacall), Abigail Delorean (Lily Tomlin), who is married to the rich and powerful Jack Delorean (Ned Beatty), and Lynn Lockner (Kristin Scott Thomas), whose husband, Senator Larry Lockner (Willem Dafoe), trusts Carter to transport her to weekly meetings with a male prostitute (Steven Hartley). One day, Lynn discovers her young boyfriend murdered and informs Carter, who goes back to the scene of the crime and looks around. Having been seen by a neighbor wiping his fingerprints off the door handle, Carter (I assume thinking he can explain it away as the paranoia of a germaphobe) calls 9-1-1 to report that he discovered the body, leading to him being the lead suspect of Detective Dixon (Geff Francis) and, particularly, of overzealous U.S. Attorney Mungo Tenant (William Hope). The investigation goes on to include Carter's lover, Turkish paparazzo and aspiring art gallery photographer Emek Yoglu (Moritz Bleibtreu from "Run Lola Run"). As the net tightens, and as Carter uses his status as a Southern gentleman and the charm which comes with it, the film plunges head-first into a seamy underbelly full of politics, gossip, intrigue and sleaze. Paul Schrader is the legendary screenwriter turned director who first explored the "man in a room" theme with his 1980 hit "American Gigolo," starring Richard Gere as a wealthy older woman's male prostitute. He continued with "Light Sleeper" (1992), starring Willem Dafoe as the uncommonly introspective drug dealing companion of an aspiring businesswoman (Susan Sarandon). Now, he has explored political intrigue and murder through the eyes of a gay escort. Harrelson is rather perfect in the role of a man who never gained his father's approval, who is constantly surrounded by aging, beautiful women, and who seems to see his station in life as being a platonic companion for the lonely and powerful of the fairer sex. The plot is a mild labyrinth in which Carter must use his connections, his wits and his knowledge of the Washington, D.C. power structure to come to an understanding of who would've killed his charge's lover and why. Ultimately, this is an effective and sorta fascinating thriller.