The Walker.

"[Paul] Schrader has denied that The Walker is a political film," notes J Hoberman in the Voice. "However, it's not only political, it's nostalgic for politics.... This is a serious movie and, gliding around the center of power, a stylish one. But, like its protagonist, The Walker is unable to close the deal."

"[Woody] Harrelson plays the latest incarnation of the Schrader hollow man, Carter Page III, the swishy scion of a Virginia political dynasty," writes Benjamin Strong in the L Magazine. "Living off his inherited fortune and a part-time gig as professional gossip monger, Carter passes his days escorting DC dames, albeit only in the non-conjugal sense. Like his forbearer in the Schrader canon, American Gigolo's Julian Kaye, Carter becomes entangled in a plodding, slightly incomprehensible murder investigation that may or may not ruin him, but that definitely bores us."

Updated through 12/7.

"[A]s The Walker wears on and the corruption spreads further up the Washington food chain, one can't help but admire how deftly director Paul Schrader has inserted some fascinating contemporary political concerns into a fairly conventional whodunit," writes Brandon Harris.

Sara Vilkomerson talks with Schrader for the New York Observer.

Earlier: First impressions from the Berlinale.

Updates, 12/6: "It looks shiny and boasts a great (or at least committed) lead performance, but has absolutely no spark, infuriating or otherwise," writes Vadim Rizov at the Reeler. "Copping out under the label of 'character study' (and inadequate even at that), The Walker marshals charged present-day time and place to no apparent effect; it's the story of an ethical freak-out that could have taken place, with only slight tweaks, 30 years ago."

"Schrader alternates between delivering cockeyed Cat People compositions and frail barbs at the current government, the latter almost as transparent and simplistic as his thriller plot is opaque and inconsequential," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "The director's interests lie not with generating any sense of real intrigue but instead with examining the inner turmoil of Carter, who, alas, can't hold up to such scrutiny, since he's basically a caricature pretending to be a real person."

"Schrader's final entry into the so-called 'night worker' or 'lonely man' saga, loosely beginning with his Taxi Driver script for Scorsese and crystallized in writing-directing combos American Gigolo and later Light Sleeper, sees the filmmaker reworking the same movie again, but without illuminative expansion or revision - save for a more downbeat ending - and so the gesture goes wasted," writes Kristi Mitsuda at indieWIRE.

Updates, 12/7: "Nothing in Paul Schrader's film The Walker can quite match its delicious opening scene of sniping repartee over canasta among three Washington grandes dames and their pet gay playmate," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Lynn (Kristin Scott Thomas), Natalie (Lauren Bacall) and Abigail (Lily Tomlin) constitute what may be the screen's most formidable threesome of jaded, dirt-dishing socialites since The Women."

"Mystery writers and filmmakers rarely make piss-elegant queens their detective heroes," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "Paul Schrader's decision to do so in The Walker is the sole interesting choice he made."

"[T]he whole thing feels fusty and forced," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "The big political issues of the day (and the past several days) are uncomfortably wedged into each nook and crevice - there's a war on every TV screen, for instance, and an artist character makes giant collages using Abu Ghraib photographs. The broader the canvas, the more the movie loses focus and the more it renders the problems of the central character sort of silly by comparison."

"Schrader steers The Walker carefully, but as a murder mystery - complete with a foot chase - creaks into action, the movie starts to lose its fraught atmosphere," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "In the end, The Walker is indelibly a Schrader film for the sheer intensity of its character scrutiny, even when we know exactly, and tragically, where everything must be headed. And if not to the extent of Mr Schrader's Affliction and its ragged star, Nick Nolte, The Walker is palpably aided by Mr Harrelson's lead performance."

"What might have been a first-rate character study... instead devolves into a routine morass of Beltway intrigue," writes Mike D'Angelo at Nerve.

Posted by dwhudson at December 5, 2007 1:26 PM