seen in Leeds (UK) on Sunday 7th November 2005, at the Leeds Film Festival

FACTOTUM   [6/10]
aka Factotum (A man who preforms many jobs)* : USA/Norway 2005 : Bent HAMER : 94 mins : seen at Vue cinema (city centre)

Factotum somewhat unwisely updates Charles Bukowski's terrific, heavily autobiographical 1975 novel to present day Los Angeles - for what are presumably budgetary reasons. On something of a roll after his Oscar-tipped turn in the overrated Crash, the long-underrated Matt Dillon plays Bukowski's alter-ego Henry Chinaski in a largely plotless series of episodes in which we see the aspiring writer struggle to hold down a series of dead-end jobs, perpetually distracted by women, the bottle, the racetrack, and his ever-nagging creative muse.

Henry Chinaski was never exactly the same person as Charles Bukowski, of course, so it's perhaps churlish to complain that Dillon - still strikingly handsome at forty - isn't exactly a dead ringer for a man whose face was a grizzled mass of boil-scars (the late Neville Brand, craggy character-actor of Birdman of Alcatraz and Stalag 17 fame, would have been ideal). But part of the point of Bukowski was that he was, by his own admission, as ugly as sin - his life would probably have been entirely different if he'd sported the rugged good looks of a Hollywood star.  
    
Dillon, meanwhile, seems content to channel Jack Nicholson's quieter side in his withdrawn performance: he traversed this dead-beat, skid-row territory with much more engaging results back in Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy (1989). His Chinaski isn't great company over the course of a feature-film, emerging as a self-centred, violent bozo with delusions of literary grandeur. We don't even know if he's any good as a writer - whereas while reading Bukowski's books we held the proof of his talent, and his success, in our very hands.

After having seen Chinaski thump his girlfriend Jan (Lili Taylor) in a bar or throttle a racetrack snob, however, it's very hard to feel any sympathy for this dysfunctional lout, no matter how irritating his lickspittle bosses may be. Norwegian director Hamer, meanwhile, displays the same kind of low-key humour which made Kitchen Stories (2003) a deadpan delight - but Bukowski's books are often side-splittingly funny, despite their grindingly grim economic context. As it is Factotum is watchable enough on its own limited terms - but it's a frustratingly missed opportunity, and Bukowski really does deserve better.

Neil Young
7th November, 2005

* NB : Although the film is generally referred to in the media simply as Factotum, the title is actually given on-screen as Factotum (A man who preforms many jobs), and therefore appears as such on the British Board of Film Classification's certificate which precedes the film in UK cinemas. The mis-spelling of 'performs' as 'preforms' is presumably accidental/careless, unless Hamer intended to make some kind of jokey point about drunken people spelling things incorrectly. Evidence of the famed Norwegian sense of humour?

click here for a list of all films seen at Leeds Film Festival 2005