Bummed Out

Barfly

Written by Charles Bukowski

Directed by Barbet Schroeder

At the USA/Harvard Square

BABET SCHROEDER'S Barfly is about a charmingly diminutive bum named Henry Chinaski (Mickey Rourke), who frequents seedy East L.A. bars, gets into fights, and drinks constantly. He also falls in love with a ravaged but residually beautiful booze queen named Wanda (Faye Dunaway). They meet in a bar, drink, stagger around the streets, drink, go to bed together, get in fights, go to bed some more, and drink a whole lot more.

So far, so good--we got some love interest, got some degeneracy, got some people bearing up pluckily under their miserable socioeconomic lot. We also have satisfyingly gory brawls and a bravura performance from Rourke, who shambles around like an elfin orangutan, with a voice that's a demented cross between Edward G. Robinson and Don Corleone.

The problem with Barfly is that it has a mission. This is to glorify the life of the Los Angeles beat poet Charles Bukowski, who wrote the semi-autobiographical script. Now Bukowski has a terrific literati-on-the-skids persona; more downwardly mobile than Kerouac or Burroughs, more degenerate than Ginsberg. He came of age as a writer in the same kind of desolate, marginal, flophouse and seedy bar milieu that Schroeder evokes so effectively in the film. And he's a fine writer--the problem is that you'd never know it from the script, which struck me as the work of a pretentious, narcissistic hack.

The self-image that Bukowski apparently wanted to project is that of a proudly independent tramp/sage, an innocently virtuous Candide figure whose crowning virtue is having "refused to join the rat race." It's cool to be a bum, Bukowski tells us. In fact, it's the only artistically valid way to live. We are meant to appreciate this when Bukowski's alter ego Henry abruptly leaves the bed of the wealthy and beautiful young editor Tully Sorenson (Alice Krige). He tells her that she "lives in a cage with golden bars," and shambles back down the hill to the sordid. but politically correct furnished flat that he shares with Wanda.

COMPLACENT, insulting lines like this abound in the script, making it difficult for us to appreciate Schroeder's solid direction of a highly competent cast. Rourke has genuine negative charisma in this film, in contrast to his vapid, one dimensional sex magnet persona in 9 1/2 Weeks. Here he's a sex symbol straight out of the Cuisinart, with his bloodstained tee shirts and battered face, and he remains likeable through the corniest moments. For all his apocalyptic late night poetry scribbling and implausible literary references, we can understand why Wanda and Tully fall in love with him, and even come to blows over him in (where else) a barroom.

Similarly, Dunaway's Wanda is a genuinely convincing waste case. She also manages the difficult feat of justifying Henry's initial impression of her as "some kind of distressed goddess." She doesn't overdo her star quality, either, avoiding the seductive trap of a 1940s melodrama performance. Even lines like "We're all in hell. And the madhouses are the only places where people know they're in hell" aren't too offensive coming from her--she has a sincerely manic edge to her that justifies her triteness.

Again, Barfly would be a good movie if it didn't constantly ram the sentiment down our throats that art can only flourish in sordid surroundings. I had no objection to Henry's choosing poverty over wealth, if that's what made him comfortable. But I didn't see why I and the rest of the audience should wallow in voyeuristic guilt over not having done the same thing. There's something much too pat and easy about a writer who presents his own lifestyle as the only possible way to live the creative life.