Factotum

Being a writer is hard work. It involves doing things you don’t like to sustain your craft. And it is a craft that may never achieve recognition.

This last fact is of course what makes a writer a writer. He doesn’t write for acclaim. He writes to make sense of the world around him. Intriguingly, like most artists, the obsession with the craft can be personally self-destructive. And the entire film is centered around not the writing obsession, as that is in the background, but in the self-destructive behavior of Henry Chinanski.

He can’t hold a job. But that is his choice. He finds spectacular ways to terminate himself, and other ways which are quite riveting to the 9-5 er watching how easy it is to lose a steady paycheck.

Homelessness he doesn’t mind. Booze and cigarettes are his fuel. As for women? The film does a poor job of cementing this as beyond a mere happenstance snippet in this writer’s life. He does shack up with someone just as capable of poor decisions as him – but why? He doesn’t have an answer until the ending.

While I am critical of film which lacks a trajectory – and this one would follow-suit – I am appreciative of its contemplation on the nature of a particular character walking through life. Despite how agitating a life of his is towards my bourgeois–upbringing – though I am not the only one, as even his father wishes he “did something” – we see a living, breathing, philosophy. His passage through time, while much more convoluted, is much more authentic than “phonies” who run away from perseverance.

Indeed, the irony here is that in the age of nihilism, we mistake his living as marked with “bad decisions”. Yet his way of life, where all he needs is paper, a pen, a cigarette, and a desk, is a more powerful reflection of living than paying the bank for a little box on the hillside.

The film beautifully concludes with one of Henry’s short stories being accepted, without his awareness. It doesn’t matter to him: he’s a writer.

Grade: B