"...the only difference being that they killed you with a smile as opposed to a gun."


http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_review/0,,2145171,00.html

The Walker

(Cert 15)

Xan Brooks
Friday August 10, 2007
The Guardian

Raw, hard-won honesty... The Walker.

Carter Page III is the black sheep of a blue-blood American family. His ancestors made a fortune from slavery and tobacco. His father was a grandstanding governor of Virginia. Yet Page, by contrast, leads a shadowy, semi-illicit existence as a "walker", playing the role of Gay Best Friend to the wealthy women of Washington DC. He is pushing 50; his corn-fed good looks are just beginning to crinkle. Returning home, he pulls off his flaxen wig and stares critically into the bathroom mirror. It is a moment that stirs up bizarre echoes of Travis Bickle's iconic "You talkin' to me?" routine, all those decades before.

Writer-director Paul Schrader has described The Walker as the final instalment in his quartet of "night worker" films, a series kicked off with his script for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and continued through American Gigolo and Light Sleeper. His hero is the existential American loner, the semi-detached member of a society guaranteed to turn its back at the first sign of trouble. Beautifully embodied by Woody Harrelson, Schrader's "walker" is at once superficial and complicated, an insider and an exile. The women thrill to his catty gossip and cooing line in flattery. But when Page finds himself embroiled in a murder investigation, they can't drop him fast enough. "Let me give you a piece of Washington wisdom," quips Lauren Bacall's imperious grand-dame. "Never stand between your friend and a firing squad."

One could class The Walker as a thriller, in that it features a murder, a political scandal and a fraught chase that ends with a car crash. But these elements all seem a little rote and rudimentary. Instead, the film's real focus is on the character of Page and his perilous relationship with the world he inhabits. Embarking on his 1993 adaptation of The Age of Innocence, Scorsese insisted that the tea-set terrain of Edith Wharton was really just as vicious as the badlands of GoodFellas, the only difference being that they killed you with a smile as opposed to a gun. You get a similar impression from The Walker's reactionary Washington backdrop. In this whirl of backslapping cocktail receptions and rapier-duel canasta parties, the weak and vulnerable are always doomed to flounder.

It's not hard to see why Schrader might identity with these peripheral figures. It was his fate to be a supporting player during the golden age of 1970s American cinema: the ugly cousin to the likes of Scorsese, Coppola and Spielberg, his films just a shade too cold, introspective and over-wound to connect with a mainstream audience. Fittingly, The Walker slopes in years after it was first mooted, with its pockets rattling with foreign change ("Asia-Pacific", "Isle of Man Films"). It looks tired, slightly soft in the middle, and yet there is a raw, hard-won honesty here that puts most contemporary US movies to shame. One has the sense that, in forging his own path, Schrader has finally reached a kind of wisdom. The screwed-up kid who once aimed a pistol at his enemies in the mirror now stares into the glass with a sweet, sad self-awareness.

... Discovery