Charles Bukowski's lethargic alter-ego meanders through the streets, bars and jobs of contemporary Los Angeles in Bent Hamer's Factotum, the Norwegian director's follow-up to his scandinavian gem Kitchen Stories. JACOB POWELL reviews.


WHAT IS LIFE?

Go to work. Go for a drink. Come home. Maybe eat, maybe make love. Have another drink and head to bed. It’s hard enough to be excited everyday heading off to a job that you like, coming back home everyday to a person that you love; but when you can’t work up the energy to care either way then neither is going to stick.

Factotum sees Norwegian director Bent Hamer, in cahoots with co-writer and Jim Jarmusch collaborator, Jim Stark, bring to the screen the 1975 novel of disaffected author/poet Charles Bukowski. The story follows comings and goings of Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s alter-ego, as he drifts through the streets, bars and jobs of contemporary LA like the slowly rhythmic movement of the tide.

Chinaski is at once layabout, writer, poet, bane of employers, and easy to please connoisseur of local drinking holes. Matt Dillon, in this role, exudes a level of listlessness to match the squalid surroundings and manages to portray a man on the cusp of caring about so many things but who can’t quite find it in himself to do more than just observe. And observe he does. He scribbles away his philosophical ramblings on his pad of yellow paper in between bouts of almost joyless drinking and sometimes satisfactory sexual encounters with somewhat kindred spirits.

Lily Taylor, as Chinaski’s fatalistic on-again off-again partner, creates some spark in the role even if she does feel a little typecast. It was a surprise to see Marisa Tomei in reasonable form too – it’s been a while for me – as another interesting narrative encounter.

Factotum is a well paced and shot, meandering ‘slices of life’ story and certainly is not a difficult watch. Chinaski’s LA is somewhat reminiscent of Daniel Clowes’ (Ghost World's author), though with a few more bars. Or perhaps that reference should be reversed considering Bukowski’s legacy.

Hamer and Stark manage to capture a series of fleeting moments of feeling which serve as figurative waypoints in the story. Character interactions between Chinaski and the other not-so-fringe dwellers he encounters create genuine humour and affection but, like the moments in which they’re birthed, these feelings quickly pass leaving only the faintest impression. What they struggled to portray was the sense of person beneath, behind, around, and in front of these moments of activity. You get the feeling that Chinaski should be more than just the sum of a few encounters but there is little evidence on screen to support this.

I’d like to say he was simply adjusting to the material but, upon reflection, my impression has strengthened that Hamer lost his way a little with this piece. Gone is the emotional warmth and easy flow imbued in his wonderful Kitchen Stories of 2003. It seems as though he has been fighting with the character and come to a stalemate. What could have been a stream of closely woven vignettes surrounded by a bittersweet malaise instead comes out as a series of two dimensional ‘happenings’ which feel a little like reading a school kid’s story in which each paragraph begins with “And then...And then...And then...”

Chinaski, and hence Bukowski, is reduced to a shadowy caricature of an archetypal ‘slacker’ whose only concern is where he can find his next drink. Maybe this is the way Bukowski wrote it; I must admit that I am somewhat ignorant of his writings. The film’s primary illumination comes in the form of narrated voice-overs of bits and pieces Bukowski/Chinaski’s writings and ruminations as the camera roves around the ever unchanging street level cityscape.

I’m sure arguments will quietly simmer away in cyberspace about whether Hamer’s Factotum shot around the essence of the raw material or that the essence of Bukowski’s Chinaski is his semi-participative lethargy. Whatever the case, the film captures well his energy deficit; maybe just a little too well.