Bukowski: Born Into This (2003)
There are many moments of piercing human ache in Bukowski: Born Into This, but I think the key scene to the film, and to understanding its subject, occurs about forty-five minutes in. Charles Bukowski is sitting in a beat up plush chair, reading a poem for one of the cameras that seemed to follow him around quite a bit. The poem begins explicit and raw, detailing two lovers washing one another’s genitalia in the shower, and becomes something unexpectedly intimate and beautiful, transcendent even, and I’m reluctant to use that word after Allen lampooned it so in Annie Hall. And there’s something else, Bukowski, the legendary, acne chewed, chain drinking, chain smoking hardass, begins to cry.
“I’m getting sentimental in my old age”, he says, embarrassed, trying to turn the whole thing into a joke. Unless Bukowski happens to be a brilliant actor, which wouldn’t surprise me, this isn’t some canned moment designed to pump up the film, it’s alive and vulnerable, just like Bukowski’s work. John Dullaghan, the director of Bukowski: Born Into This, has an unexpected wealth of material here: readings, conversations with wives, family, co-workers. This film is blunt, candid, economic, and absolutely wonderful.
I’ve known of Bukowski in that distant Great Writers We Don’t Actually Read kind of way for most of my life, starting with a review I read early on of his Barfly. A cursory mention of the man appeared in the film Sideways and reminded me that I wanted to check him out. I saw Factotum, an adaptation of his second novel, early last year. Then I caught a portion of Born Into This around the same time on a movie channel, and the power of the footage finally inspired me to pick up a damn book. The library I frequent only had one volume: a collection of poetry called Slouching Toward Nirvana, one of his posthumously published works.
I read it over the next two nights, and drove to a book store and picked up a couple of novels in his “Chinaski” series: Post Office and Women. I was hooked: shaked and moved, by the man’s words. Bukowski pulls off something in his work that I normally don’t buy: the hard drinking man who does little, sleeps and screws a lot, and that’s somehow reflective of the fucked up world we live in. For most writers this is glossier porn, for Bukowski it begins as some sort of wet dream: the kind a man working a thankless job in a post office might have, and becomes something altogether more searching and dark. The drinking, the fucking, the smoking, the perpetual unemployment, it’s all a shell game in Bukowski’s work. His stories, his novels, his incredible poetry, are all about that brief, fleeting hope for some sort of human connection; a connection that’s best understood by understanding all of the taboo substances that are a part of our everyday lives: cum, shit, flatulence, saliva. The man’s words punch through in brief, curt bursts, an SOS from Hell.
Born Into This captures this and more. Bukowski is allowed to be brilliant, allowed to be vulnerable, but the film doesn’t shortchange the paranoia and violence either. There’s another moment where Bukowski, very drunk, accuses his last wife of being unfaithful, and disrespectful. He curses her, tells her he’s gonna get a Jewish lawyer to deal with her, and viciously kicks her off the couch. Linda Lee Bukowski, the wife in question, matter of factly tells us that she never took that again, and that is that. Later on we see footage of Bukowski’s marriage to Linda, and, again he begins to cry. Born Into This gets the contradiction of any man much less a great one, and it doesn’t burden us with explanation. The film gets that most art, whether its much good or not, is usually the work of the wounded; a cry for forgiveness or acceptance, or for the simple acknowledgement that its creator is as entitled to draw air as those that more settled in their own skin.
Bukowski himself would’ve probably ended this review two paragraphs ago, he notoriously hated movies, but there’s one more episode I wish to share. Linda Lee sits over Charles’ grave and recalls his last breaths after succumbing to leukemia at the age of 74. She gets to the breath part, about to describe the change of expression in his face and the lifting of the pain he probably felt all of his life, and stops, and turns her head sideways. She pauses, holding it in, and resumes the story. It is one of the most graceful handlings of hurt I’ve ever seen in life or film, as graceful as her troubled husband’s work, and almost as extraordinary. Charles, you’re forgiven sir.
★★★★
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