Berlinale Dispatch. The Walker.

Paul Schrader's The Walker appears to be taking on that odd character in the institutional life of Washington DC, but even more so a creature of New York, the convivial gay man who accompanies (walks) rich married women to events that their husbands are too busy (or too uninterested) to attend. (Is it work or the mistresses that are keeping the men away?) Woody Harrelson is the walker here, and he fits the part of the guy you'd most like to sit next to at a dinner party - good breeding, great taste, an instinct for delivering the well-targeted compliment at the right moment, and the kind of unerring instinct for gossip that's comparable to a pig's nose for truffles. Page Carter III, Harrelson's character, knows how to dress, and he also knows how to wear a toupee, a rare skill, judging by all the bad ones out there.

Updated through 2/20.

But The Walker is really trying to be about something else. Schrader's script focuses on a Justice Department smear campaign unleashed after one of Harrelson's lady friends, a Democratic senator's wife (played by Kristin Scott Thomas), finds her lover dead and bloody in his townhouse. Is everyone in Washington cheating on his or her spouse? You can understand why. Washington's not the most exciting town.

It turns out that he had news about a corporate stock manipulation scandal that would have implicated a powerful lawyer at a major firm and the Vice President. Sound familiar? In a town where the art of compromise is really about moral compromise, which is really about corruption, Harrelson protects his friend, and finds himself isolated, with his life and his boyfriend's life threatened. Bear in mind that they are not being threatened with being outed as homosexuals, as was the case in Advise and Consent, the classic 1959  Washington novel by Allen Drury, and the 1962 film by Otto Preminger. At least we've made some progress.

Schrader could have done a better job plotting this one, which is watchable, but lacks anything really chilling at its core, like the concrete consequence of corporate crooks walking in and out of the White House, or the ruthless tactics that they've been willing to use to stay there.

Wasn't Jack Abramoff the real walker, the guy who seems to have had carte blanche to walk anywhere where top Republicans were running things, the unelected fixer who walked corrupt politicians through legislation that they wanted passed? Not exactly. As we know from the black hat that Abramoff wore at his arraignment, he lacked a fundamental walker's skill. He didn't know how to dress, and it wasn't for lack of money. Notice that all the "friends" he had just a year or two ago aren't rallying to his side.

Harrelson plays the hero here, and he plays him well. The problem is that the villains of the real scandals in Washington are far more dramatic, colorful and downright sinister. And we're just beginning to get a picture of what's been going on down there since 2000.

-David D'Arcy

The casting of Lily Tomlin and Ned Beatty as a married couple, however peripheral they are as characters, sparks what I'd consider a perfectly natural association in at least this viewer's mind: Nashville. Now, whether or not Schrader actually intended to invoke Robert Altman's signature portrait of a city's cultural milieu, no matter how realistically that portrait is meant to jibe with the rules of social engagement in the corresponding real city, the comparison highlights one of The Walker's flaws that rankled me most. In Nashville, when the characters talk politics - mourning the Kennedys or, more mundanely, recalling the smell of oranges - their views seem to be genuinely theirs. In The Walker, the plethora of snide remarks about the current administration are not only just plain superficial, they seem snatched from the air and tacked on here and there, wherever - Schrader wrote the screenplay, too, by the way.

Granted, superficiality - as well as unabashed insincerity, of course - are part and parcel of the world Schrader's attempting to conjure here. But whether it's the bit roles (Willem Defoe's "liberal" senator, for example) or even the leads, you'd think that these people wallowing in the political cesspool day in and day out would have worked up some sort of distinguishing rhetorical flair of their own. Instead, all the throwaways about the viciousness of the atmosphere in DC these days seem mouthed by the same puppeteer. There are a few exceptions. Car's lawyer mentions that, since 9/11, federal investigators have been cut loose to savage civil liberties and Car himself, steeped in American history (his late father, who taught the subject in university, is said to have made a mark for himself during the Watergate trial), lists a few delusions he's abandoned in the past few years, one being, for example, that it's the American people who elect their president. That's about as deep as it cuts, sadly, and again, it happens way too rarely. The result: The illustrious cast comes off as a bunch of Hollywood snobs trying on this season's line in political fashion.

I'll second David's comment about Harrelson's performance. It's probably a good one; the problem is, it really doesn't look it. Harrelson has gone way out on limb to get at the well-bred Southerner, the queen bee of the weekly game of Canasta. He's found an interesting wavelength in which to buzz, but he's out there all alone. The other actors are all tuning into whatever they can find, and the band's pretty wide - Schrader's failed to set the tone of his movie, and that goes for more than the performances. Following one tableau after another, the camera suddenly tilts into a chase scene, for example, and a fairly lackluster one it is, too. As is the film, period. What a waste.

Update, 2/20: Ryan Gilbey salutes Harrelson's performance in the Guardian.

Posted by dwhudson at February 14, 2007 3:24 PM