The mythology of Charles Bukowski gets another go-round in this fitfully funny and acerbic, but shapeless and style-free, cut-rate Canadian-shot adaptation of a Bukowski roman-a-clef. Matt Dillon fills out the author’s scruffy, bitter, occasionally rowdy yet largely passive persona perhaps more accurately than Mickey Rourke’s full-bore machismo in Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly (1987), but otherwise that was an entirely superior film for capturing the nitty-gritty pseudo-poverty that Bukowski’s pseudo-autobiographical heroes revel in.
Instead we get plastic indie-budget blandness and a couple of slumming semi-stars. But Factotum is still worthwhile, detailing the decline of hero Hank Chinaski from semi-employed wannabe to down-on-his-ass wastrel. Along the way he gets caught up in a successful betting scam, and enters an on-again, off-again tryst with the horny, ineffably plebeian Jan (Lili Taylor), fights with his critical, angry, strait-laced father (James Noah), and is briefly initiated into the circle of a plutocrat weirdo, Pierre (Didier Flamand), who adopts barroom flotsam, thanks to one of his girls, Laura (Marisa Tomei).
Director and co-writer (with Jim Stark) Bent Hamer portrays a world of crummy jobs and bullshit bosses, full of folk for whom the bloom of youthful self-delusion has long since worn off, leaving them with little but fractious appetites and wayward impulses that can be just as well fulfilled by a good fuck as by cash, until the temptation to flee for security often becomes overwhelming. Or, in Hank’s case, to run away from security. Moments like when
Meanwhile Hank essays his own constant self-defeat with a Zen master’s dedication to avoiding becoming anything as long as his true life project continues to be unfulfilled, until, at last, his breakthrough comes at the same moment he’s completely divested himself of all worldly status – that is, sitting on the pavement, homeless and drunk. Whilst it all barely hangs together as cinema, as a transposition of Bukowski’s perspective, it’s competent enough. This was Adrienne Shelly’s second-last film as an actress, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it part.
