On the occasion of the USA Film Festival's 25th anniversary, there could not be a more inspired and appropriate choice to receive the organization's Great Director award than this bookish, bespectacled, 48-year-old auteur. With the possible exception of Martin Scorsese, no working American director in his age group better illustrates the tension between instinctive talent and absolute self-awareness.
He has worked as a film critic and a magazine editor, and has written countless scholarly and critical articles as well as two influential books of film analysis (one on the works of Carl Dreyer, Yasujiro Ozu, and Robert Bresson, and another on film noir). In another life, he could have been a great film critic, or the kind of legendary college professor who inspires fellow students who cross paths years after graduation to hug each other giddily and sing his praises. The depth of his education--not just in film, but in literature, music, history, philosophy, art, and theology--is so intimidating that if he didn't look and talk like Elmer Fudd and conduct himself with such humility, even arrogant cinephiles might find him terrifying.
Yet his calling has always been as a provocative and often infuriating film artist. His screenplays (including Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Mosquito Coast, The Last Temptation of Christ, and major, uncredited contributions to Close Encounters) and his directorial efforts (among them Hardcore, American Gigolo, Mishima, and The Comfort of Strangers) inspire many extreme reactions, but indifference is never among them.
He's possibly the most film-schoolish of all the film school-generation directors, a diverse group of Baby Boomers that includes Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Francis Coppola, George Lucas, Paul Mazursky, and Peter Bogdanovich. They are a part of cinema's ongoing history and a repository of that same history, eager to quote, borrow, and steal from earlier movies, yet longing to make each quotation, borrowing, and theft their own. They want to explain magic to the rest of us, but they dream of retreating to a place in their lives where such explanations are unnecessary. They snack on the Fruit of Knowledge from dawn to dusk, then go to sleep dreaming of a joyous return to the Garden.
Of all the directors listed above, Schrader is almost certainly the smartest--too smart for his own good, some might argue, considering that he's either directed or significantly contributed to more than 20 fascinating American films, yet has rarely broken through to mainstream success. "As a director," writes film scholar David Thomson in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, "Schrader has placed himself on the edge of the mainstream. He understands commerce very well; he could explain how to make hits. But some perverse, rugged integrity has left his work increasingly hermetic and narrow in its range."
In their thematic concerns--obsessiveness, paranoia, rage, faith, repression, and the anxiety of the outsider longing to fit in but knowing he never can--Schrader's work hews transparently to his own personality and preoccupations. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1946 to strict Dutch Calvinist parents who forbade him to indulge in the secular vice of moviegoing, Schrader quickly began living a secret life, learning about cinema vicariously by reading books, newspapers, and magazines and thinking about the medium constantly. He did not set foot inside a movie theater until he was 18 years old.
Wracked by loneliness, depression, and thoughts of suicide, he later enrolled in film school at UCLA and studied the history and technique of cinema with monklike devotion. In 1974, the scholar crossed through the looking glass when his script for the Japanese-themed gangster picture The Yakuza, cowritten with his brother, Leonard, was sold for a then-record $500,000 and turned into a vehicle for actor Robert Mitchum.
His next screenplay, for Martin Scorsese's movie Taxi Driver, would set the tone for his future work. It was the story of "God's lonely man," Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro), a Vietnam veteran who takes a job driving a hack in New York to deal with his chronic insomnia and nightmares. Driven to the edge by his own internal demons and by his attraction to two women, a child prostitute (Jodie Foster) and a buxom campaign worker (Cybill Shepherd), he fixates on a presidential candidate and becomes obsessed with assassinating him to prove that he is somebody--"a person like other people." Through a stroke of dumb luck, Travis fails in his assassination attempt and ends up expending his rage across town in a whorehouse full of thugs and gangsters. If his original plan had worked, Travis would have been vilified as a homicidal nut case; instead, he is hailed as a righteous vigilante hero.
Although the exact nature of Travis' mania is never explicitly discussed, it seems to stem less from his war experience than from some fuse that blew in childhood and rendered him ill-equipped to connect with his fellow human beings--especially women, who he views as either angels or whores. More than one critic has pointed out that although the film's climactic explosion of violence is played out in graphic, gory slow-motion, in an earlier scene, which sees Travis being rejected by a woman he's trying to talk to on a pay phone, the camera ostentatiously dollies away from his embarrassment and looks down an empty hallway. It is as if the pain of this skinny cabbie's failure to get a girlfriend is more horrible than a close-up look at mass murder. The scene, writes Roger Ebert, "is fascinating because it helps to explain Travis Bickle, and perhaps it goes some way toward explaining one kind of urban violence. Travis has been shut out so systematically, so often, from a piece of the action that eventually he has to hit back somehow."
As New York magazine critic John Simon noted, the story mixed the elegance, precision, and allusiveness of European cinema (particularly French auteur Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest, another film about a troubled loner who documents his internal struggles through journal entries) and the purplish, lurid, tabloid qualities of wildman American director Samuel Fuller (The Naked Kiss, Shock Corridor). There were other influences, from cinema verit to the hyperreal melodramas of Douglas Sirk (Magnificent Obsession) to the mythic Western rescue plot of The Searchers to the perverse diaries of real-life assassin Arthur Bremer, who shot and crippled Alabama governor George Wallace in 1972.
But what made the script so special was its nakedly personal quality; reading it was like leafing through the notebook of a disturbed artist grappling with his own darkest impulses. New Yorker critic Pauline Kael hailed it as a masterpiece. The film was a box-office hit and won a slew of Oscar nominations, including Best Picture (it lost to Rocky, another film about an urban loner that was decidedly more upbeat). Taxi Driver was also roundly condemned in some quarters for its graphic violence, for its empathy with a psychotic killer, and for its stylized, gothic vision of New York as hell on earth. (Poking fun at Travis' voice-over narration--in which he reveals that every time he brings his cab in at the end of the night, he has to clean the come off the back seat--critic John Simon quipped, "Every night? Now, really, Travis!")
Concerns that the picture would serve as a legitimization of potential assassins everywhere were renewed in 1981 when Dallasite John Hinckley, who considered Taxi Driver his spiritual autobiography, shot President Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster. Three years later, the film was brought up again by cultural pundits when white New Yorker Bernard Goetz impulsively gunned down four black teenagers who he believed were about to mug him on a subway car. While Hinckley was locked away in an insane asylum, Goetz received only the barest of legal penalties and was labeled a hero by millions of Americans.
The contrast between their fates only proves how prescient Taxi Driver was and how informative it continues to be. Oliver Stone once said that when he was studying filmmaking at New York University in the '70s, with his own war experience just a few short years behind him, he used to fantasize about "doing" Richard Nixon with a sniper's rifle. "I felt like Taxi Driver was about me," he once confessed. On our worst days, it's about all of us.
Schrader continued to mine this disturbing dramatic vein throughout his career. That same year, 1976, saw the release of a Brian DePalma horror film written by Schrader--Obsession, a schematic reworking of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. His next script, for the John Flynn action picture Rolling Thunder (1977), was Taxi Driver without the arthouse sensibility--another story of a traumatized Vietnam veteran (William Devane) who lost his hand to a band of marauding thugs teaming up with a war buddy (Tommy Lee Jones) and exacting spectacular vengeance. It looked to skeptical critics like Schrader was a one-trick pony.
Fortunately, he proved them wrong with his directorial debut, Blue Collar (1977), about three downtrodden auto workers (Richard Pryor, Yaphet Kotto, and Harvey Keitel), fed up with the soul-destroying shenanigans of their corrupt union, who decide to seek freedom from the system by robbing the union coffers. Although uneven and sometimes overwrought, the film is notable for its keen insight into issues of race and class, and for its refusal to sentimentalize the plight of its working-class heroes.
The following year brought Hardcore, about a repressed Calvinist father (George C. Scott) who pretends to be a sinner and goes looking for his porn actress daughter in Los Angeles' grimy sexual underworld. An obvious reworking of Taxi Driver (whose hero also visited the red-light district to simultaneously get off and wallow in self-loathing), the film was panned in some quarters as an unsuccessful indictment of American puritanism that revealed more about the obsessions of its director than the moral sickness of the country that made him.
Schrader's one and only hit film, 1979's American Gigolo--about a narcissistic young stud who makes a living satisfying women but actually gets off on his own handsome image--made a star of Richard Gere and brought a new sensibility to American movies: a hip, slick aura of technopop alienation that singlehandedly laid the visual groundwork for 10 years' worth of music videos and perfume commercials. It's notable as a piece of gay camp, and as a basic text for the new breed of pretty-boy leading men who had no need for a fleshed-out female love interest because they were already infatuated with themselves. On purely technical terms, it's a superb piece of work, somehow managing to tell the story of a man with a completely unstructured, irresponsible life through images as rigidly controlled as anything by Stanley Kubrick.
Schrader's next movie, Cat People, a remake of horror master Jacques Tourneur's 1942 film about shape-shifting monsters, carried American Gigolo's vision of humans as sexual animals to a hysterically over-the-top conclusion, chronicling the misadventures of an incestuous brother and sister who change shape after sex, then must kill to regain human form. For a film steeped in the most taboo sins of the flesh, the film has a peculiarly religious aura, and even its most perverse elements are handled with an almost scientific dispassion. "The final impression," carped The London Sunday Times, "is of a phantasmagoric indulgence in sound and vision by a filmmaker who fears sex and is excited by violence."
Schrader' s next film was his masterpiece. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1987) told of Japanese author Yukio Mishima, whose life was a nexus of many of the same contradictions that had fascinated Schrader for decades. The ultimate outsider, Mishima was a lonely man who wrote mystic, wild novels about questing, violent heroes. Even though he faked an illness to avoid serving during World War II, he later became a fanatic bodybuilder, weapons collector, and martial artist who lived in a self-designed fortress staffed by his own private army and eventually ended his own life with an act of hari-kari. Wreathed in voice-over narration, switching film stocks on a dime, and pouring on a pounding, magisterial score by Philip Glass, the film intersperses vignettes from Mishima's life with re-creations of key scenes from his writing.
Paradoxically, Mishima simultaneously explains everything about the man and nothing at all--which, of course, is the point. Schrader's fetishistically geometric screenplay ends up a parable about how no amount of information can reveal the meaning of a man's life. A supreme example of Western technique merged with Eastern subject matter, this expensive, narratively off-putting, intellectually dense movie was a giant box-office dud. But perhaps because it is so spare, poetic, and inscrutable, it has gained cult fame. It rewards repeat viewings; it's as tough, sharp, and resilient as a samurai sword, and every bit as gorgeous.
After adapting Paul Theroux's book The Mosquito Coast, about a deluded missionary who goes nuts in the South American jungle, as a vehicle for Harrison Ford, Schrader's next effort as director was the uncharacteristically warm rock-and-roll melodrama Light of Day (1988), about a brother and sister, their family, and their band. It was notable mainly for its attempts to redefine the career of cutey-pie comic actor Michael J. Fox and to make a screen star of guitar goddess Joan Jett.
After the release of Martin Scorsese's confused, passionate, and controversial biblical epic The Last Temptation of Christ (for which Schrader adapted an elusive and difficult novel by Nikos Kazantzakis) came Patty Hearst, a 1991 docudrama about the title character's kidnapping by and assimilation into the Symbionese Liberation Army. It made the career of its star, Natasha Richardson, but divided critics; some saw its arty retelling of Hearst's ordeal as cruel, while others hailed it as a brilliantly wrought cousin of Mishima, hiding dramatic truths between cunningly judged bits of sadism, paranoia, and black comedy.
In any case, the film is worth seeing for its chilling first act, told entirely through Hearst's eyes as she's being brutalized and reprogrammed by her captors--among the most brilliant first-person sequences in cinema--and for its exceptional performances, particularly by Richardson; Ving Rhames as Cinque, the inscrutable African-American leader of the group; and William Forsythe as a weaselly white guerrilla who worships Cinque. ("God damn, I wish I was black!" shrieks Forsythe at one point, unknowingly summarizing the future career of Quentin Tarantino.)
Then came The Comfort of Strangers, about a young couple (Natasha Richardson and Rupert Everett) who meet a mysterious, foppish German millionaire (Christopher Walken, looking like a zombie in a tux) while on vacation in Venice, fall under his spell, and pay a terrible price. The film is almost certainly Schrader's most perverse, and his most entertaining, too--provided you're fond of two-hour sick jokes starring a terminally self-satisfied American cult hero whose ornate accent sounds like a cross between Omar Sharif and Count Chocula.
Schrader's 1992 mood piece Light Sleeper, another reworking of Taxi Driver, concerned a rootless Manhattan drug dealer named John LeTour (Willem Dafoe) struggling to find meaning in his repetitious life. The Taxi Driver elements--a voice-over narration culled from the hero's diary entries, and a bloody, blowout finale--were deployed with evident weariness, and with good reason: Light Sleeper finalized a slow, steady shift in Schrader's sympathies as a filmmaker.
In the early part of his career, he identified more strongly with the crazies, the loners, the hustlers, the righteous, and the damned. But from Light of Day onward, he seemed to identify more with the put-upon, sensitive, and responsible characters--the worrywart Michael J. Fox character in Light of Day, the shell-shocked survivor Patty Hearst, the hapless couple in Comfort, the incredulous, tough-minded, skeptical Judas in The Last Temptation of Christ. It is possible, as David Thomson notes, that Schrader's long-time marriage to actress Mary Beth Hurt, his role as nurturing, domesticized father, and his recent ascension to the status of institution have conspired to lock Travis Bickle out of sight and out of mind.
Or perhaps not. It's instructive to consider the final image of Taxi Driver: Travis Bickle post-rampage, driving down the street with a sly half-smirk on his face, seemingly purged of his violent urges and ready to live a peaceful life. Then comes a closeup of the cab's rearview mirrors, catching Travis as he looks into his own eyes--then a freakish, dissonant sound, like feedback, as Travis smacks the mirror away, ensuring that for a while, at least, he won't have to face himself. That noise is the cry of demons stuffed down deep inside a man, biding their time, waiting to make their move. It's the sound of stitched wounds ripping open.
