The Canyons (Paul Schrader, 2013)

 

Cast: Lindsay Lohan, James Deen, Nolan Gerard Funk, Amanda Brooks, Tenille Houston, Gus Van Sant, Jarod Einsohn, Danny Wylde, Victor of Aquitaine. Screenplay: Bret Easton Ellis. Cinematography: John Paul DeFazio. Production design: Stephanie J. Gordon. Film editing: Tom Silano. Music: Brendan Canning. 

Notoriety is a double-edged sword. Lindsay Lohan's tabloid headlines and James Deen's career in porn got them cast in a movie, The Canyons, by the respected director Paul Schrader. But the movie's own notoriety, its reputation for badness, did nothing to further a comeback for Lohan or an emergence into respectability for Deen. (Subsequent accusations that Deen was a serial rapist didn't help.) It's not, I think, quite as badly acted as some say: Lohan gives a more than competent performance and Deen has a wolfish presence that lends his character credibility. Schrader is skilled at creating an atmosphere of moral decay that almost makes the movie into the fable about contemporary Los Angeles that it wants to be and its title suggests. But it was made on the cheap with an inadequate supporting cast, and it never comes to life as either erotic drama or social commentary. 

Hardcore (Paul Schrader, 1979)

Cast: George C. Scott, Peter Boyle, Season Hubley, Dick Sargent, Leonard Gaines, Dave Nichols, Gary Graham, Larry Block, Mark Alaimo, Leslie Ackerman, Charlotte McGinnis, Ilah Davis. Screenplay: Paul Schrader. Cinematography: Michael Chapman. Production design: Paul Sylbert. Film editing: Tom Rolf. Music: Jack Nitzsche. 

Blue Collar (Paul Schrader, 1978)

Cast: Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, Ed Begley Jr., Harry Bellaver, George Memmoli, Lucy Saroyan, Lane Smith, Cliff De Young, Borah Silver, Chip Fields, Harry Northrup, Leonard Gaines. Screenplay: Paul Schrader, Leonard Schrader. Cinematography: Bobby Byrne. Production design: Lawrence G. Paull. Film editing: Tom Rolf. Music: Jack Nitzsche. 

Affliction (Paul Schrader, 1997)

Cast: Nick Nolte, James Coburn, Sissy Spacek, Willem Dafoe, Brigid Tierney, Jim True-Frost, Holmes Osborne, Mary Beth Hurt, Marian Seldes. Screenplay: Paul Schrader, based on a novel by Russell Banks. Cinematography: Paul Sarossy. Production design: Anne Pritchard. Film editing: Jay Rabinowitz. Music: Michael Brook. 

Cat People (Paul Schrader, 1982)

Cat People (Paul Schrader, 1982)

Cast: Nastassja Kinski, Malcolm McDowell, John Heard, Annette O’Toole, Ruby Dee, Ed Begley Jr., Scott Paulin, Frankie Faison, Ron Diamond, Lynn Lowry, John Larroquette. Screenplay: Alan Ormsby, based on a story by DeWitt Bodeen. Cinematography: John Bailey. Art direction: Edward Richardson. Film editing: Jacqueline Cambas, Jere Huggins, Ned Humphreys. Music: Giorgio Moroder. 

Cat People is bloodier and kinkier than its source, the moody 1942 film of the same name, directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by the maker of atmospheric horror films, Val Lewton. In the earlier movie, the ravages of the prowling cat persons were off-screen, suggested but not shown. In Paul Schrader’s remake, they’re played to shock, not just to creep you out. The subtext, a fear of sex, remains the same, although the earlier film is more about a fear of female sexuality, while the Schrader version adds incest to the mix. It’s all very stylishly done, with Nastassja Kinski excellent as the woman haunted by a past she is unaware of, and Malcolm McDowell as her unstable brother. John Heard is rather eccentrically cast as the male lead, a New Orleans zookeeper, though he’s an improvement over the dull Kent Smith in the original film. The wonderful Ruby Dee has a smallish but important role as Female – pronounced Fe-MAH-ly.

The Comfort of Strangers (Paul Schrader, 1990)

Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson in The Comfort of Strangers

Cast: Rupert Everett, Natasha Richardson, Christopher Walken, Helen Mirren, Manfredi Aliquo, David Ford, Daniel Franco, Rossana Canghiari, Fabrizio Sergenti Castellani, Mario Cotone, Giancarlo Previati, Antonio Serrano. Screenplay: Harold Pinter, based on a novel by Ian McEwan. Cinematography: Dante Spinotti. Production design: Gianni Quaranta. Film editing: Bill Pankow. Music: Angelo Badalamenti. 

Like Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973), Paul Schrader's The Comfort of Strangers exploits the enclosed and labyrinthine character of Venice for sinister potential, but unlike Roeg, Schrader and screenwriter Harold Pinter, following Ian McEwan's book, make the city into a place where psychosis and not the supernatural seems to flourish. It was probably the wrong place for a handsome young couple like Colin (Rupert Everett) and Mary (Natasha Richardson) to come to, as they say, "work on their relationship." She is the divorced mother of two small children, an actress who does voiceover work for commercials; he's apparently some kind of editor, for he sometimes fiddles around with a manuscript that he proclaims "unreadable." But what matters more than what they do is how they look: They're quite beautiful. And that attracts the notice of Robert (Christopher Walken), a bar owner who surreptitiously photographs them and, we later learn, takes the pictures back to his opulent flat to show his disabled wife, Caroline (Helen Mirren). Eventually, Robert lures Colin and Mary to his bar, where he tells them stories of his past, of his cruel, overbearing father. Colin and Mary get lost on the way back to their hotel, and an exhausted (and perhaps drugged) Mary collapses, so they spend the night huddled in an alley. The next day, they agree that Robert is not someone they want to spend a lot of time with, but nevertheless he manages to find them and invite them to his apartment to meet his wife. The spider has lured them to his web. Eventually, we will learn that Robert is a psychopath and that his relationship with Caroline is sadomasochistic. That fact makes the emotional and sexual vulnerability of Colin and Mary more acute. This is one of those instances where the casting of an actor, namely Everett, inevitably adds a layer of significance to the character he's playing. Everett had come out as gay only the year before The Comfort of Strangers was made, and it's almost too easy to read this aspect of the actor's real life into his art. When we first meet Colin and Mary there's an element of sexual tension between them: They are sleeping in separate beds in their hotel room, and at one point she says that what he really needs is more sex. Later, after their encounter with Robert and Caroline has released something in them, Colin and Mary have passionate sex, but at one point he admits that he has always wondered what it's like to be the woman during sex. Robert, meanwhile, accuses Colin of being a "communist poof," and later tells him that he has told the men in the bar that Colin is his lover. I can't help feeling that Schrader has exploited Everett's real-life sexuality in the film, and Everett himself has notoriously advised gay actors not to come out of the closet if they want major careers -- his own hit the skids not long after the release of The Comfort of Strangers. Setting that aside, the film is opulently staged and filmed, well acted, and Schrader sets up the revelations of its plot and characters skillfully. But there's also something airless and perfunctory about it. I don't know enough about Colin and Mary to feel a sense of violation at what happens to them, to regard it as more than just formulaic psychological thriller stuff.  

American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980)

American Gigolo (Paul Schrader, 1980)

Cast: Richard Gere, Lauren Hutton, Hector Elizondo, Nina van Pallandt, Bill Duke, Brian Davies, K Callan, Tom Stewart, Patricia Carr, David Cryer, Carole Cook, Carol Bruce, Frances Bergen. Screenplay: Paul Schrader. Cinematography: John Bailey. Art direction: Edward Richardson. Film editing: Richard Halsey. Music: Giorgio Moroder.

"So quick bright things come to confusion." One moment Armani-clad Julian Kay is weaving smoothly through L.A. traffic in his Mercedes or striding confidently into the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the next he's standing in a lineup of suspects in the brutal murder of one of his clients. American Gigolo has always divided critics between those who think it's shallow and humorless soft-core porn and those who find it "stylish and surprisingly poignant." I tend somewhat toward the latter view: It seems to me an American version of something like Jacques Demy's Bay of Angels (1963), with Richard Gere's Julian as a kind of equivalent of Jeanne Moreau's platinum blond Jackie Demaistre -- a lost and lonely soul adrift in a glamorous setting. It's America on the cusp of the Reagan '80s, before AIDS. The stories of male prostitutes have never been given the attention by the movies that they deserve. Perhaps it's because in a male-dominated society the question of who's exploiting whom is a little more complicated when the prostitute is a man, typically seen as the one to be pleasured rather than the pleasurer. Paul Schrader suggestively makes Julian's procurers a woman and a black man -- figures that a good-looking white male like Julian would typically not find himself subordinated to. I don't think American Gigolo fully explores all of its potential, but it rewards a second look to examine its multiple subtexts.

First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017)

Ethan Hawke in First Reformed

Toller: Ethan Hawke
Mary: Amanda Seyfried
Jeffers: Cedric the Entertainer
Esther: Victoria Hill
Michael: Philip Ettinger
Balq: Michael Gaston

Director: Paul Schrader
Screenplay: Paul Schrader
Cinematography: Alexander Dynan
Production design: Grace Yun
Film editing: Benjamin Rodriguez Jr.
Music: Brian Williams

"Derivative" is a much-overused word in film criticism: Everything comes from something else, and even the film praised as "original" is eventually going to reveal its sources. So it's not a knock on Paul Schrader's First Reformed that it feels so strongly influenced by the directors Schrader wrote about in his book Transcendental Style in Film: Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Theodor Dreyer. What directors haven't been influenced by them, or at least had to acknowledge that the intensity and commitment of their work suffers in comparison? The resemblance to Ozu's work is purely stylistic in First Reformed: a spareness and stillness of image, sometimes even a sense of claustrophobia in Schrader's determined use of the so-called "Academy ratio," the 1:37:1 frame familiar to us from movies made before widescreen technique became common to moviemaking. A more direct borrowing comes from Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951) whose title character has intestinal torments that are reflected in those of Schrader's upstate New York priest, Toller. And the spectrum of religious faith, from non-belief to obsession, exhibited by Schrader's characters is found among the characters of Dreyer's Ordet (1955). But the film that seems to have most directly influenced Schrader is Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (1963), whose ailing, doubt-ridden pastor finds himself unable to prevent a troubled member of his congregation from committing suicide. There are times when Schrader's cinematographer, Alexander Dynan, even seems to be copying the setups of Bergman's, Sven Nykvist: Both, for example, give us views of the preachers facing out upon chilly, nearly empty sanctuaries, backed up by the emblems of the faith they barely cling to. If anything, Schrader's film is a kind of updated version of Winter Light; in First Reformed the existential dread of the times is no longer annihilation by nuclear warfare but instead the uncertainly looming cataclysm of climate change. Schrader of course goes beyond mere time-shifting: Ethan Hawke's Toller is not just a latter-day version of Gunnar Björnstrand's Tomas Ericsson, but a contemporary man with contemporary problems like dealing with the clammy hold that corporate capitalism has on his church, in the form of Michael Gaston's Balq and the toadying Jeffers, the preacher for a "prosperity Gospel"-style megachurch, surprisingly played by Cedric the Entertainer. And Toller finds ways to console the widow of the man who commits suicide that might have shocked Ericsson. This is the point at which derivativeness becomes a virtue in Schrader's film, when we can superimpose Bergman's vision of faith onto our own, more than half a century later. There are moments when Schrader's film seems to miss the mark and slip over into mere thriller-movie melodrama, particularly the introduction of ecoterrorism in the form of a suicide vest, so that we miss the maturity with which filmmakers like Bergman and Bresson and Dreyer resolved their characters' spiritual crises. But Hawke, in a performance that is more assured and sensitive than any I've seen him give, holds the film together admirably. 

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, 1985)

Ken Ogata in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

November 25, 1970, and flashbacks:
Yukio Mishima: Ken Ogata
Masakatsu Morita: Masayuki Shionoya
Gen. Mashita: Junkichi Orimoto
Mother: Naoko Otani
Grandmother: Haruko Kato
Mishima, age 18-19: Go Riju
Mishima, age 9-14: Masato Aizawa

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion:
Mizoguchi: Yasosuke Bando
Kashiwagi: Koichi Sato
Mariko: Hisako Manda
Monk: Chishu Ryu

Kyoko's House: 
Osamu: Kenji Sawada
Kiyomi: Reisen Lee
Mitsuko: Setsuko Karasuma
Osamu's Mother: Sachiko Hidari

Runaway Horses: 
Isao: Toshiyuki Nagashima
Lt. Hori: Hiroshi Katsuno
Kurahara: Jun Negami
Izutsu: Hiroki Ida
Interrogator: Ryo Ikebe

Director: Paul Schrader
Screenplay: Paul Schrader, Leonard Schrader, Chieko Schrader
Based on novels by Yuko Mishima
Cinematography: John Bailey
Production design: Eiko Ishioka
Film editing: Michael Chandler, Tomoyo Oshima
Music: Philip Glass

In the midst of watching Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, I found myself having feelings of déjà vu -- specifically, during the chapter titled "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion," a dramatization of one of Yukio Mishima's novels. Then it came to me: It was the novel on which Kon Ichikawa's film Conflagration (1958) was based. I had faulted Ichikawa's film for the confusions caused by a "truncated" adaptation of Mishima's novel and for its "sometimes plodding narrative," while praising the intensity of Tatsuya Nakadai as the crippled young acolyte. Seeing the condensed version of the Mishima novel in Schrader's film makes me want to go back to watch Conflagration again, or really to read the novel along with the others integrated into Schrader's film about Mishima's troubled but intensely creative life. The point of the Schrader film is that Mishima's art was inextricable from his life, from his coddled and repressed childhood through his sexual excesses and finally his disastrous paramilitary adventure and suicide. Ken Ogata doesn't look much like Mishima, but as his work in such films as The Demon (Yoshitaro Nomura, 1978) and Vengeance Is Mine (Shohei Imamura, 1979) shows, Ogata has the kind of raw commitment to acting that makes him perfect for the role of the charismatic and self-destructive artist. Schrader's Mishima is one of a kind, a fascinating blend of superb cinematography, evocative art direction, and hypnotic music, along with a disturbing story. In some ways, I prefer Schrader's film to the more celebrated ones made by Martin Scorsese from Schrader's screenplays, namely Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980).

Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver

It's a truism that movies and dreams have much in common: We experience them in the dark; we ascribe portents and personal insights to them; they present us with a non-linear experience, in which events don't follow in logical sequence, and point of view is continually shifting. And nobody knows this better than Martin Scorsese, who gives us in Taxi Driver a story that appears to be realistic but which, the more we ponder it, proves to be dreamlike. Take the conclusion of the film, for example: After slaughtering a roomful of brothel patrons and personnel, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) attempts suicide but fails, and in a coda we see that he has become a hero, that the 12-year-old prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster) he has tried to rescue has returned to her parents, and that Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), whom he has frightened by stalking, now regards him as a hero, too. It is the most unlikely of "happy endings" in an era that had begun to mock such conventional resolutions. So it's no surprise to find that there are commenters on the film who think that the entire sequence is a dream, or a fantasy of the dying Travis. Certainly there are things in the sequence that don't entirely jibe with a realistic interpretation, and not just the fact that Scorsese himself is not inclined to anything so square as a happy ending. The news clippings on the wall of Travis's apartment don't look like actual clippings, and the photograph of Travis included with them hardly looks like De Niro. Iris has been adamant about never returning to her parents. And Betsy seems unlikely to warm up to Travis after he shocked her by taking her to a pornographic movie. Scorsese has never endorsed, nor fully repudiated, this interpretation of the ending as a fantasy, but the screenwriter, Paul Schrader, has said that the ending is merely there to bring the film full-circle, meaning that Travis's murderous loner cycle will begin all over again. I think it better to regard the whole film as a nightmare about contemporary urban loneliness, filtered through what Scorsese knows best: motion pictures. From the moment the saxophone begins playing Bernard Herrmann's theme, we are cast into the mythical realm of the film noir, a genre dear to Scorsese's heart. Cinematographer Michael Chapman turns 1970s New York City into a city of dreadful night, a neon-lighted hell full of smoke and steam, and Scorsese manipulates extras into demonic gatherings. One of the more shocking sequences takes place when Scorsese himself plays a passenger in Travis's cab, making him wait outside an apartment house and watch the silhouette of the passenger's wife on a window shade as she has a meeting with her black lover. (The passenger uses an uglier word to describe the lover.) But the scene is not shot realistically: It should be clear to even the most naïve movie-watcher that the silhouette has been crafted with special lighting, a kind of distancing device that puts the emphasis on the film as a parable and not as a docudrama. More and more, I come to think of Taxi Driver as Scorsese's greatest film because it makes us not only reflect upon and challenge what movies are doing to us but also because it gives us a sense of modern anomie unequaled in any other film. Travis Bickles are all around us, and in America, with its laxness about weaponry and its emphasis on individual liberty, they continue to appear, whether in the form of Arthur Bremer -- the man who attacked George Wallace, whose diaries De Niro studied while creating Travis Bickle -- or John Hinckley, whose Taxi Driver-colored fantasies drove him to shoot Ronald Reagan to attract Foster's attention, or the next psychopath with a grievance whom we'll learn about after the tragic fact. But Scorsese should not be blamed -- indeed, he and De Niro should be praised as highly as possible -- for bringing Travis to our attention, for taking our nightmare and reprising it for us so effectively.

Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)

Some people think this is a great film. The American Film Institute in 2007 ranked Raging Bull No. 4 in its list of 100 best American movies, behind Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), and Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). It is certainly an accomplished film: Michael Chapman's cinematography uses black and white in ways that hadn't been seen since color came to dominate filmmaking in the 1950s; Scorsese and his joined-at-the-hip editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, accomplish wonders, especially with the fight sequences and the occasional eruptions of violence; the set decoration by Phil Abramson, Frederic C. Weiler, and Carl Biddiscombe evokes the shabby milieu and its changes over the decades convincingly; and the performances of then-unknowns Joe Pesci and Cathy Moriarty made them into overnight sensations. And then there's what even I will accept as Robert De Niro's greatest performance, which won him a best actor Oscar. The film critic Mick LaSalle likes to categorize Oscar acting nominations as either "transformations" or "apotheoses." In the former, actors create new images for themselves, while in the latter, they simply take their existing images and raise them to newly vivid heights. But in Raging Bull De Niro does both: He transforms himself into both the self-destructive young boxer Jake LaMotta and the bloated older LaMotta, living on his long-ago laurels, but he also brings something new and more intense to the existing image of De Niro as a fiercely inward actor. For these reasons, I think, the film makes many lists of the greatest films of all time. So why does it leave me cold? Why, among the Scorsese and De Niro collaborations, do I prefer Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and Goodfellas (1990)? Is it that Mean Streets is more varied and colorful, Taxi Driver more probing in its exploration of psychosis, and Goodfellas smarter and wittier? Could it be that Raging Bull lacks texture, depth, and humor? Is it that Jake LaMotta is one of the most unsympathetic figures to receive a biopic treatment, or is it that Scorsese was never able to find a multi-sided personality in the screenplays credited to Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin that were worked over by both Scorsese and De Niro? In another American Film Institute ranking, Raging Bull was proclaimed the best sports movie of all time. But Scorsese has said that he doesn't care for sports in general and boxing in particular, and I think it shows. His movie is about the brutality of boxing, not about the sport that involves both offense and defense, and requires not only a well-honed skill but also intelligence -- or if not that, at least a greatly developed cunning. There is nothing of that in his portrayal of LaMotta. The movie's reputation, therefore, remains something of an enigma to me.