the blog of nathan loding

Fac­to­tum (2005)
Star­ring: Matt Dil­lon, Lily Tay­lor, Marisa Tomei
Directed by: Bent Hamer
Writ­ten by: Bent Hamer & Jim Stark, based on the writ­ings of Charles Bukowski
Rated: R
Rat­ing: ** (two stars out of five)

Fac­to­tum, n., an employee or assis­tant who serves in a wide range of capac­i­ties. This is what the dic­tio­nary and the movie cred­its tell us about the title. And it def­i­nitely fits the story.

The story revolves around Henry Chi­naski (Dil­lon), a potrait of Charles Bukowski, which is to say a drunk, wom­an­iz­ing writer who aspires to … What does he aspire to? The story starts off bril­liantly. The first scenes fol­low Chi­naski through his job as an ice man out on a deliv­ery to a bar. His boss fol­lows him, dis­cov­ers the ice melt­ing in the back of the deliv­ery van and Chi­naski inside hav­ing a few drinks next to an old man who says he’s slept longer than Chinaski’s been alive. It’s a great sequence.

Chi­naski then moves along to var­i­ous jobs — work­ing at a pickle fac­tory, bicy­cle shop, and brake shoe man­u­fac­turer among oth­ers — and he ends up liv­ing with Jan (Tay­lor). Later he’s spend­ing his time with Laura (Tomei) after a spat with Jan. Then he’s back with Jan again, for a few min­utes at least. And then it ends.

Bukowski is reknowned for his drink­ing and wom­an­iz­ing, liv­ing in the gut­ter for a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of his life. He was not the best man who ever lived. I love his poetry, and my favorite poem of his is fea­tured in this movie. “A poem is a city filled with streets and sew­ers / filled with saints, heroes, beg­gars, mad­men, / filled with banal­ity and booze / filled with rain and thun­der and peri­ods of / drought, a poem is a city at war.”

That poem is a per­fect exam­ple of Bukowski’s work and pos­si­bly his per­son too. It describes a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of Fac­to­tum as well. But it doesn’t make the movie any bet­ter or more mean­ing­ful than it was. The movie lacks a purpose.

The film­mak­ers intended to make a film about a man, a writer, who drinks and has found a dif­fi­cult path through life, but a path that he chooses to take nonethe­less. What they ended up mak­ing was a film about a drunk on a dif­fi­cult path through life, one that he’s too lazy to step away from, who hap­pens to write.

The movie is extremely well directed, and the act­ing is very well done. It is very much a pro­fes­sion­ally made movie. But again, that doesn’t give it a larger pur­pose or mean­ing. The first act had me enveloped in the story: the awk­ward moments, the quirky state­ments Chi­naski makes, they all wove together pre­cisely. The last two thirds of the movie repeated the ter­ri­tory it had already tra­versed over and over again. By the end, I was left in the same place I started, with no bet­ter grasp of any sin­gle char­ac­ter, and feel­ing no dif­fer­ent about anything.

The movie ends with another Bukowski piece: “If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feel­ing like it. You will be alone with the Gods. And the nights will flam with fire. You will ride life straight to per­fect laugh­ter. It’s the only good fight there is.” I found myself in love with that quote. And yet, I felt it had no place being in that movie.

It was meant to be a movie about a man devot­ing him­self to writ­ing, every­thing else be damned; it turned out to be a movie about a man who refused to change and some­times wrote some­thing. Well made, but lack­ing in pur­pose and vision. Bukowski devo­tees may love this film, but not many others.