The old man down the road

The old man walks as though his torso belongs to someone else. Body and mind seem tenuously coordinated at best. Sheer will power—another term for stubbornness—goads him as he traverses the shoulder of the road leading out of Billings, Montana. His destination is Lincoln, Nebraska, which even a cursory glance at a map will tell you is a hell of a ways. His velocity makes the lawn mower in The Straight Story seem like a concord in comparison. But that film’s old-timer had his wits about him, whereas Woody (Bruce Dern) appears touched by dementia, its creeping inwardness a blessing, perhaps, for a man who never said much and habitually took refuge in alcohol. Dementia is the token explanation for Woody’s insistence on traveling to Nebraska to collect what he claims is an enormous windfall but for the rest of us is obviously a Publisher’s Clearing House-type scam. Only later in Nebraska does Woody’s son, David (Will Forte), suggest that dad “just needs something to live for.” 

David needs something too, to escape the deadening routine of selling stereos and from the heartache stemming from the recent failure of a romantic relationship. So, in spite of the inherent absurdity of Woody’s itinerary, David decides to drive Woody to Lincoln, though they wind up spending most of their time in the fictional town of Hawthorne, where Woody grew up. Many who remain there still remember Woody from the old days. The farmhouse in which Woody spent his childhood still stands—if barely. Nebraska is really David’s journey. It’s about a son wondering who his father is or was, about how time seems to render our parents fundamentally unknowable. It’s too late for David to get close to Woody in any meaningful sense, but it isn’t too late for him to learn something about Woody that might help him map a route through his own life.

Alexander Payne’s sixth film is the first on which he takes no writing credit. It is also his most fully realized since abandoning satire (i.e.: Election) for somewhat less prickly studies in characters and regions (About Schmidt). Phadon Papamichael’s ashen, monochromatic cinematography mirrors both the vintage and fogginess of Woody; it also reflects new, welcome gradations of nuance in Payne’s characters and offers nod to certain traditions in American landscape photography. (Nebraska’s stark highways and turnpikes also echo the image on the cover of Bruce Springsteen’s album of the same name.) Imagery, character complexity, rhythms and regionalism: in so many ways Payne’s latest strikes me as a vast improvement from its widely acclaimed predecessor, The Descendants, which in many respects settled for the corniest take on its Hawaiian setting (the musical score, most annoyingly), and featured the rare George Clooney performance that feels at once oddly leaden and false, most notably in the overly sombre way the star reads the prosaic opening voice-over. (Payne says that no matter how his films end up he always thinks he’s making a comedy—I think he forgot to mention this to Clooney, in so many other films a deft comic actor.) A road movie without the excesses of local colour that often clog the genre, Nebraska’s story is simple, its themes straightforward and its ambitions modest, but the degree to which Payne, working from a script by Bob Nelson, realizes these ambitions make the film richly rewarding both as an aesthetic and emotional experience. 

Which is where I should finally address the enigmatic heart of the film. After cutting his teeth in Roger Corman exploitation counterculture flicks in the ’60s, Dern became one of those marginal legends of the New Hollywood of the ’70s—the very definition of “character actor” for an entire generation. Substantial roles in quality films were rare, as was recognition, though Dern did get an Oscar nomination for his role as a Vietnam veteran in Coming Home. So much of his work is memorable for being singularly hysterical (that’s a compliment—no one does high-pitched flip-outs like Dern). After a career of going off the rails it’s thus that much more fascinating and strangely moving to see Dern reach this autumnal triumph, playing a role that demands he remain remote, apart from the others, not so much confused as slowly dissolving into the film’s aluminium siding, wood panelling and flat vistas. Forte, an actor known for comic roles, perfectly compliments Dern with patience, approachability and kindness—his David is an easy-going guy who needs some way to shatter his own passivity. What David discovers by being forced to confront the mystery of his father is something of a value that one usually needs half a lifetime to come to terms with. Thankfully, Nebraska is made with such heart and craft we needn’t wait that long to know that something very special has transpired. The feeling is right there, waiting, as we reach the end of this particular road. 

                  

Guns, germs and steal: Richard Stark's Parker novels return, still nasty after all these years

Point Blank, based on Stark's The Hunter

He has several aliases but only one name, no detectable heartbeat, and, so it seems, not a single significant weakness. Money is typically his sole motivator. He’s quirkless and calculated, a logician efficiently eliminating obstacles. He beats women, occasionally, mercifully, killing them. Parker, the protagonist of Richard Stark’s long-running series of lean, mean mystery novels, isn’t flamboyant or indulgent enough to be a monster, exactly. He has no ideology, no longing for power. (If politics ever entered his mind, he might call himself an anarchist.) A thief by trade and a murderer only when necessary, he claims not to like killing people. A consummate professional, essentially—and in this sense an anachronism held over from Depression era crime, as his author’s confessed—and his professionalism may be the only aspect of his character we could consider redemptive.

Though I knew some of the films adapted from them, including the masterful neo-noir Point Blank (1967), and I’d often heard them praised by discerning fans of the genre, it took me a long time to get around to the Parker novels, partially because many were hard to track down, partially because I couldn’t quite fathom how they could be compelling for readers who weren’t just sadistic voyeurs. But the University of Chicago Press has recently underwent a campaign to get Parker back in print in affordable and handsome editions, and I dove in. And now I get it.

Donald Westlake, aka Richard Stark

Richard Stark was the most successful of numerous pseudonyms attributed to the celebrated novelist and screenwriter Donald Westlake, who died last New Year’s Eve at the age of 75. The first Parker novel was intended as a one-off, a sort of experiment, but his publisher accurately predicted that it would be a hit, and many more swiftly followed. Chicago has so far reprinted the first nine. Let me tell you about the three I’ve read.

The Hunter (62), Stark’s debut and the source for Point Blank, introduces Parker in a state of uncharacteristic destitution, walking along a clogged freeway into Manhattan. He spends the first chapter reconstituting himself, quickly building capital through a day’s work of fraud and shopping. He’s come back from the dead, or close enough. He visits Lynn, the wife who supposedly killed him—the book’s first half is in one sense a divorce parable—and will soon pay a visit to the fellow criminal who set it all up. What drives Parker here is pure revenge, a force that renders him—again, uncharacteristically—vulnerable. “He wanted Mal Resnick—he wanted him between his hands. Not the money back. Not Lynn back. Just Mal, between his hands.” Of course, given a little time, he’ll want the money, too.

Point Blank

The Hunter’s more self-consciously hard-boiled than later Parkers I’ve read, emphasizing Parker’s rage, his ripping the filters out of cigarettes, his adversary’s nervous stroking of their moustaches. A pang of sexual desire is described as “a knife twisting low in his abdomen,” though Parker strictly abstains from humpy-pumpy while working. But when Lynn winds up dead and Parker needs to dispose of her body he completes the act with a telling, prophetic gesture. In slashing her face he’s being icily pragmatic, making her death less likely to be made public, but he’s also eliminating the visage of the only woman that ever possessed him, and rehearsing the erasure of identity that he’ll later seek for himself with an equal lack of sentiment. After he settles the score with Resnick and single-handedly extorts the national crime syndicate.

By the time of The Mourner (63), Parker has bought himself a new face and fully resumed his routine of performing one or two big heists a year and otherwise retiring to some resort under a false name. By now the distinctions in the Stark style are maturing fully: the vivid descriptions of spaces, the Nabakovian wit, the audaciously elliptical structures that toss the reader into the midst of the action without context and, most fascinatingly, the detours into ornate biographical sketches of secondary characters who slowly emerge as pivotal to the plot.
Parker’s hired by the father of a lover to steal a statue, one of many originally sculpted to accompany a fifteenth-century French tomb, but a well-planned job is interrupted by a separate group of criminals who may or may not be after the same thing. Parker forges an uneasy alliance with Menlo, a fat, oddly charming bureaucrat from a tiny Eastern European country under Soviet control. Like Parker’s current employer, Menlo’s a voluble romantic, and much dry comedy arises from the contrast between Parker’s taciturn nature and the rambling narratives these others casually unleash. More silent than all of them however is the titular statue itself, a brilliantly conceived symbol of precisely the sort of emotional release to be found nowhere in the world Parker inhabits, and an ostensible treasure whose owner ironically never even registers its absence.

Made in USA, based on Stark's The Jugger

The Jugger (65) begins with Parker being visited by a cheerful leprechaun from his past just as he turns to the obituary page of the local rag in a hotel room in Sagamore, Nebraska. Parker’s here to investigate the suspicious death of Joe Sheer, an old comrade who retired in the town, and the leprechaun, who goes by the name of Tiftus, is just one of several opportunists who crop up with the hope of unearthing Sheer’s ostensible buried treasure. Taking Parker out of his milieu and having him on the scene basically to solve a mystery, chart his way through a labyrinth of greed, and assess some possible damage to his alias’ reputation, The Jugger is a virtually perfect little crime story, a rural noir with character to spare and an alignment of theme and action that’s both classical and inventive. It was also the first one I read, doing so in anticipation of the belated theatrical and DVD release of Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in USA (66), in which the Parker character’s embodied by Anna Karina—surely the only casting that actually stands a chance of one-upping that of Lee Marvin. I can't wait to finally see it.