In keeping with most of writer-director Paul Schrader’s movies, Affliction (1997) tracks one man’s undoing. The man coming apart is Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte), a sheriff lording over the small New Hampshire town where he was born and raised. Mid-movie, he likens himself to a whipped dog. His estranged ex-wife (Mary Beth Hurt) and his young daughter (Brigid Tierney) hate him. No one is especially buying into his theory around a recent murder case. And he’s still haunted by the physical and emotional abuse he suffered at the hands of his father (James Coburn). (Like the latter, he’s also an alcoholic who seems pissed merely to be in a state of soberness.) Wade swears, forbiddingly, that he’ll one day bite back.
We know that vague reprisal will come sooner rather than later. The film begins with its narrator, Wade’s brother Rolfe (Willem Dafoe) — who smartly comes to town only for special occasions — informing us that the movie to come is “the story of my older brother’s strange criminal behavior and disappearance.” One of Affliction’s feats is how well it sustains overpowering dread around Wade’s inexorable turning while preserving a small, ill-judged spark in us hoping for salvation. The iota of uncorrupted goodness we see in Wade, at least for a while, goes a decently long way. Nolte’s great performance fosters empathy for a man increasingly stroking the devil in him, exacerbated by a claustrophobic, snowy landscape that feels only like more callousness pushing him toward the brink.
Based on a 1989 novel by Russell Banks, Affliction explores a conceit that has fascinated Schrader for the whole of his career: how a man’s feelings of insufficiency, paired with a particularly emotionally challenging period in his life, can dangerously fuse and externalize themselves into reckless violence. Where that insufficiency is rooted varies — in Taxi Driver (1976) it’s largely sexual; in Hardcore (1980) parental; in First Reformed (2018) theological — and in Affliction the births of Wade’s various shortcomings can be traced back to the violence of his father growing up.
Schrader flashes back to scenes from that unhappy childhood with true scariness, visually distinguishing them from the present-day action with shaky, digitally shot footage like home videos from hell. Coburn is captured in them like the devil tormenting eternally damned souls. The actor’s iconic Cheshire Cat grin — whose malevolence has in movies tended to get played up — practically emitting evil. Wade has made an effort to keep some distance from his dad. But they’re brought together more substantially through a death in the family.
Old age hasn’t abated any of the man’s cruelty. Being in such close proximity to it again, even with a relatively strong relationship with a kind local woman (Sissy Spacek) to ground him, has a way of lighting the compartmentalized trauma Wade has tried to keep stored away like a tub of gasoline. Though you can see his childhood mistreatment continuing its cycle even before Affliction enters the phase where Wade has reached a point of no return. It manifests in the casual meanspiritedness offered to his child and ex-wife — in his roughness as a policeman. Affliction is a frightening drama about the ripple effects of abuse — so effective that we come to consider it more a horror film unsoftened by any assurances that this is only a movie.
Peterson Reviews 