With Barfly, Barbet Schroeder did the only smart thing anyone could do with a movie based on tosspot writer Charles Bukowski's scribblings—he made it into a sort of woozy alkie-camp. With a skeaze-peak Mickey Rourke as Bukowski's alter-ego, Henry Chinaski, shambling about in a glad-tipsy haze from bar to fight to floozy, Schroeder's film itself felt as drunk as its sodden lead.
But Norwegian filmmaker Bent Hamer—working from a script co-written by producer Jim Stark—offers us a flavorless Shirley Temple of a film, so sober it seems stunned, like it was shot on its first day in AA. While imbued with a certain glum mood, it's a film where, if you've seen the poster—Matt Dillon in the Chinaski role, sitting in a dive smoking while a pair of pickled women look vaguely in his direction—you've seen the movie.
Okay, there's more to it than that. Between losing crap jobs and getting trashed, Chinaski screws and abuses Lili Taylor's annoying white-trash drunk, then screws and abuses Marisa Tomei's sauced-up gold-digger. Tomei is fascinating as a woman existing in slow motion because anything more rapid would have her crawling the walls. A movie about her would really be something.
But this is about Bukowski, although we're not at all sure in what way. The press notes trumpet the writer's famous observation that "some people never go crazy—what truly horrible lives they must lead," and Dillon's Chinaski echoes that same sort of essentially juvenile individualism. (Does anyone over the age of 17 take seriously the author's occasionally colorful work?)
Dillon's Chinaski—who varies from a near-comatose disinterest to a near-comatose mild annoyance—does little to advance the cause of boozed-up-writer-as-noble-overseer of human foibles. But there is a glancingly seductive value in the notion of advanced alcoholism as obliviated escape from responsibility, although only Tomei gets across the sloppy, sexed-up abandon of this iffy conceit.
Still, in a key scene that might be a summary, we see Chinaski, after selling his first short story but unaware he's done so, sitting in a dive where a lone stripper works the pole in front of what looks like a future version of the writer: a grizzled, middle-aged customer so deep in his cups he doesn't notice the near-nude hottie. Over this image, Chinaski delivers a victorious voice-over completely bereft of irony or any self-awareness. Had this been the film's starting point, it might have served as a promising, honest look at the author. But it isn't. Or perhaps it's simply because, when taking Bukowski at his sodden solipsistic word, there isn't much there there.