Hardcore (1979)
When Paul Schrader’s chilly, distant, intellectualized sensibility fits the subject matter (Affliction, Autofocus, portions of his Exorcist) the results can be extraordinary. When they don’t, and they don’t fit Hardcore, his films feel like particularly boring, borderline inhumane exhibits at the Calvinist Guilt Science Emporium Road Show.
Schrader’s bad films are all theory, no feeling or story, you grab what he’s dealing with without giving the slightest of damns what happens. This is why Martin Scorsese was such an ideal interpreter of Schrader’s work. Scorsese isn’t perfect, and he can be overrated in stretches, but he understands, lives and dramatizes feverish obsession and guilt like nobody’s business.
Hardcore, like portions of the Scorsese-Schrader Taxi Driver, was evidently informed by that particular generation of directors’ pre-occupaton with The Searchers. You wouldn’t have to read too deep to get that here. George C. Scott is Jake, but he’s playing a haunted, immovable man of few words in the Wayne in The Searchers mode, only here Scott’s superiority isn’t under examination.
From the get go Scott is above the pornographers who’ve apparently made off with his daughter and there’s no friction or temptation. Scott is a prig here, the kind of character Harvey Keitel’s Sport assumes DeNiro to be in Taxi Driver, and if there wasn’t a little girl mixed up in this, you’d probably root for the pornographers.
I counted exactly one human moment in Hardcore and that’s early on when we can hear the strains of Neil Young’s haunting “Helpless” as Scott questions a porn clerk about a movie his daughter appeared in. That and Peter Boyle’s amusing supporting performance are it.
Leave a Reply