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AUTO
FOCUS
6/10
USA 2002
: Paul SCHRADER : 104 mins
As always,
X’s direction is powerful and his characters are natural and real, but,
as is too often the case, he has chosen to film a script whose lead character
is a thoroughly unlikable figure. Eventually you may give up trying to
figure out what makes Y tick and just get fed up with his antics… When
the film ends, you realise that it has no core, no real theme. It’s just
about a louse.
The above is
from Danny Peary’s book Guide for the Film Fanatic, with ‘X’ and
‘Y’ substituted for the names Martin Scorsese and Jake La Motta: Peary
is reviewing Raging Bull. But change ‘X’ to Paul Schrader and ‘Y’
to Bob Crane – the minor TV celebrity of whom Auto Focus is a biopic
– and the comments apply just fine. It’s no coincidence: Schrader is credited
as main scriptwriter on Raging Bull.
Michael Gerbosi,
however, wrote Auto Focus, an adaptation of the non-fiction book
The Murder of Bob Crane by Robert Graysmith. That title suggests
Graysmith concentrates mainly on the mysterious circumstances of Crane’s
death in the early 1980s – he was bludgeoned while sleeping, and no-one
was ever tried or convicted of the crime. Schrader and Gerbosi, however,
don’t dwell on this event, apart from pointing the finger fairly blatantly
at Crane’s former best pal John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe) – emphatically
not the film director of the same.
Auto Focus
spends much more time on the previous couple of decades in Crane’s
life, from his early 60s career as a low-level radio DJ, to his sudden
rise to fame as the title character in hit TV sitcom Hogan’s Heroes,
to his increasingly pathetic wilderness years that followed the end of
the show: a downward spiral accelerated by Crane’s obsessive interest
in pornography, which reaches new heights (depths?) when the technologically-minded
Carpenter introduces him to new-fangled ‘video tape’ technology.
It’s this obsession
that forms the meat of the movie and which makes it fit closely with Schrader’s
long-established personal themes. Crane regards his sex life as healthy
– “I’m normal,” he says on more than one occasion. But it costs
him his career (word of his energetic ‘swinging’ soon gets around Hollywood),
two marriages – to long-suffering Anne (Rita Wilson) and easy-going Patricia
(Maria Bello) – and, finally, his life, when he offends the eager-to-please,
terminally insecure Carpenter once too often.
The first half
of Auto Focus compellingly introduces Crane as a breezy, cocky,
easy-going, ambitious overhang of the chipper, conformist 1950s: a fine,
brave performance from Kinnear, who appears in just about every scene.
And just as Hogan’s Heroes pulled off the tricky feat of making
serious subject matter (a WW2 prison camp) a fit subject for comedy, Auto
Focus is thankfully unafraid to aim (successfully) for humour even
as it starts heading into increasingly choppy psychological waters.
Things start
going downhill, however – for both Crane and the movie – when he drifts
into a strung-out reverie on the Hogan’s set, which Schrader illustrates
with a clunky, old-fashioned nightmare-fantasy sequence. After this, Crane’s
descent is dizzyingly fast, and the film disappointingly settles into
being yet another (sub-Boogie
Nights) showbizzy rise-and-vertiginous-fall tale
of which Confessions of
a Dangerous Mind is the most recent obvious example. We realise
that, in Peary’s phrase, Auto Focus is “just about a louse” – a
man whose ‘antics’ alienate his friends, lovers, colleagues and family…
and also the audience. So much so that we end up counting the minutes
till he, and we, are put out of his misery.
20th
May, 2003
(seen on VHS [!], 13th May 2003)
by Neil
Young
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