As Carter Page III, the title character in Paul Schrader’s latest brooding portrait of solitary manhood, Woody Harrelson doesn’t walk the corridors of power so much as he sashays down them. It’s a bold if sometimes shaky performance, heavy on the julep-inflected accent and queeny mannerisms; it’s also the first time since The People vs. Larry Flynt, over a decade ago now, that Harrelson, an underrated actor, has really taken command of the screen. Though Carter’s father was a much-beloved senator who made a name for himself during the Watergate hearings, his openly gay son has eschewed politics, finding a measure of superficial happiness as a “walker”—a chaste, catty companion to various D.C. wives (played by Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin and Kristin Scott Thomas) whose powerful husbands are too busy (or just too bored) to escort them to the opera or sit around on a lazy afternoon playing canasta.
Of course, there’s only so much gossip and canasta a viewer can take. Or so Schrader clearly assumes, since he quickly introduces a tedious thriller plot that steers the movie in a much more conventional direction. Faithful as a pet dog, but far more pathetic, Carter sits patiently in the car while Lynn (Thomas), a senator’s wife, stops by the home of her lobbyist lover for some afternoon delight. When her screams rouse him from his stupor, he rushes inside to find Lynn standing in horror over her paramour’s bloodied corpse. Needless to say, for Lynn to be found at the scene of the crime by police would result in scandal and divorce, so Carter, gallant to the last, attempts to shield her by sending her home and claiming to have discovered the body himself. Which, since he had no plausible reason to be there, makes him suspect No. 1. (Fans of obscure ’80s cinema may recall this as the basic plot of The Bedroom Window, with Isabelle Huppert as the honcho’s cheating wife and Steve Guttenberg as the dope who protects her.)
It would be a stretch to call The Walker homophobic, but there’s no getting around the fact that Carter, as written, comes across as more of a self-loathing punching bag than is strictly necessary—the movie itself seems to dislike and/or dismiss him almost as much as does everybody within it. Harrelson, to his credit, plays this rather thankless role with enormous sympathy and sardonic wit, even if he occasionally leans overly hard on surface affectations. But what might have been a first-rate character study—there’s a terrific early shot of Carter staring into his bedroom mirror as he removes his expensive toupee, his expression at once rueful and defiant—instead devolves into a routine morass of Beltway intrigue. Hounded by blowhard police detectives and ambitious politicos, chased by hired assassins down moonlit streets, saddled with a thoroughly unconvincing Turkish-German paparazzo boyfriend (Moritz Bleibtreu), poor Carter has to juggle so much narrative nonsense that his fundamental loneliness, along with his slowly dawning realization of his expendability in the heavily mascaraed eyes of the ladies he loves, winds up getting short shrift.
The Walker
** 1/2
Woody Harrelson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lauren Bacall, Moritz Bleibtreu
Directed by Paul Schrader
Rated R