AFFLICTION - director: Paul Schrader; starring: Nick Nolte, James Coburn, Sissy Spacek, Willem Dafoe

I’ve decided to write a series of reviews entitled “Downer Cinema” showcasing films that at the core are very good and even great but are some of the most depressing films ever to see the light of day. These films find yourself saying, “That was a great movie! I never need to see that movie again!”

“Affliction” is a movie I saw on video upon it’s initial release in 1997. It’s a film of unrelenting power that when I would be surfing the cable movie channels years later and see that it was showing I would quickly blip to the next channel. I couldn’t bare to even see one frame without feeling I needed to freebase some Zoloft.

In so making this summation of this movie you’re probably wondering , if this film was so goddamned unbearable then why recommend it for other people to endure and suffer the same fate? Because unlike other movies around at that time Affliction felt authentic while other movies like Kids and anything by Atom Egoyan , except The Sweet Hereafter, which coincidentally, is also based on a Russell Banks story, rang hollow. Affliction boldly stays true to it’s downward spiral.

Affliction tells the story of Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte) a faded small town hero who is a paper policeman, a lackey for a prominent businessman who practically owns the town and has everyone on his payroll. When another wealthy man dies mysteriously in a hunting accident, It triggers in Wade a sense of purpose to solve the crime that ultimately shows how truly lost and adrift he is in his own life.

Writer/Director Paul Schrader is on familiar ground here, examining the damnation of the pained male psyche that he has explored in countless films he has either written or directed such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Hardcore and Blue Collar. Affliction is perhaps one of his best screenplays and by far the best directed of his films. His script has the perfect mix of his observational style and Banks’ tranquil fatalism. Schrader constructs Wades’ downfall like a Greek tragedy. The sins of the past culminate in the present leading to his doomed destiny of being a slightly gentler version of his monster of a father.

This is where the violent need for Prozac kicks in. Schrader boldly explores the path that most men find unbearable, the path of examination, the Freudian gobbledygook that makes men so emotionally disconnected. Schrader explores this deftly, and precisely making us feel empathy and disgust for Wade.

Affliction is bereft of Schrader’s usual cold disdain for his characters, a distancing he uses in his writing that has tripped him up in his prior films. He dares to be in the skin of Wade Whitehouse.

The film is anchored by the best performance of Nick Nolte’s career. Nolte, whose willingness to break free from his leading man pigeon hole from his early career has made some of his later film and acting choices arch and over the top. Here his fearlessness is warranted bringing a brave truth to his performance.

James Coburn, in one of his last performances, finally got to show his subtle genius in a showy role as Wade’s horrible father so well in fact, that it garnered him an Oscar. Sissy Spacek, Willem Dafoe, and the woefully underused Mary Beth Hurt round out the pitch perfect cast.

Affliction is no lightweight trifle, but it isn’t heavy-handed in tone as the narrative suggests. It explores themes such as murder, and addiction with an unnerving view that is intimate rather than showy which made it disturbing upon first viewing but that intimacy is what gives Affliction the density of a novel and the cinematic scope of watching an ordinary man lose his soul. Party On!