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His sad pathology noted, welcome to Wade Whitehouse's eerily disturbing world. Played with stunning pathos and ingenious complexity by Nick Nolte, the Dick Tracy-jawed policeman ekes out a living in one-horse Lawford, New Hampshire, doubling as a crossing guard and part time snowplow operator. This is small town life at its hardscrabble bleakest -- always snow on the ground, but grimy and never newly fallen. Yet Wade will be the first one to tell you that everything's going to be all right. It just sure doesn't look that way.
He has learned to rationalise practically all of life's letdowns, heretofore coming off more as a hale and hearty fellow than a washout. But recently, things suddenly seem to be unravelling. With almost each perceived downturn, director-screenwriter Paul Schrader (who wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull) attaches an explanatory footnote, a grainy insight into Wade's tormented youth.
The shocking flashbacks inevitably depict a drunken, bullying Glen Whitehouse (James Coburn) indulging his Neanderthal impulses at the expense of his terrified family. The older son, Wade bears the brunt of his vicious father's painful onslaughts, always attempting to shield his mother and younger brother (who grows up to be a college professor, played by Willem Dafoe, and narrates the story) from the loathsome bruiser's vile outrages. It is Schrader's eloquently torrid thesis (adapted from the novel by Russell Banks) that father and son are, consciously or not, continuing a detestable tradition of violence, one that doubtless has been in the family for generations, maybe even going back to the Stone Age. It is a chilling commentary on what you pray is only a small sector of civilisation's male population.
Divorced twice from a wife who has since managed to marry well (and thus by extension confirms his loser status), Wade's been granted rather stingy custody privileges. Nine-year-old-daughter Jill (Brigid Tierney) is astute enough in one early scene to assure the down-at-heel father that she loves him, but she's apparently giving up on him, too. On one telling occasion, anxiously looking forward to a night of daddy-daughter bonding, Wade takes Jill to a Halloween party at the local school. But she is overcome by the provincial shindig's uncomfortable shabbiness and begs to be taken home to Mom. While visibly hurt by the episode, he keeps his disappointment in check. He is certain that victory in custody court will eventually lead to a better relationship with his daughter.
While it safely can be assumed that Wade has never spent any time on the psychiatrist's couch, he is no dummy. The tentative way he initially deals with his daughter suggests he understands something about his virulent syndrome, at least enough to know he doesn't want to be his father's son. And even though the odds are overwhelming, we root for this underdog to break the chain.
Then the opportunity for redemption seems to present itself. A Massachusetts bigwig is killed in a deer hunting accident. Perhaps it wasn't an accident after all. Shady real estate deals, a hinted connection to the Mafia, and other allusions to wrongdoing could spell conspiracy. But is the protagonist's hunch a piece of good police work or merely the desperate fantasy of a paranoid gone asunder? To complicate matters, Wade's chief murder suspect is his friend Jack (Jim True), a young hunting guide. And the high muckamucks he figures are behind the assassination happen to include his big-fish-in-a-little-sea boss, Gordon LaRiviere, distinctively portrayed with a swell Canadian accent by Holmes Osborne.
The delirious odyssey that follows is delivered in trance-like stanzas, Schrader solemnly mixing mystery with psychological conjecture. In a fine bit of dramatic business meant to symbolise Wade's internal holocaust, a toothache he's neglected serves as a barometer to the spiralling crisis. The action, like the toothache, reaches excruciating heights.
Making matters even more ghastly, the child abuse nightmare has continued into Wade's adulthood, and not only as a repulsive legacy. The elder Whitehouse lives. And Wade, doing his take on the dutiful son, checks in on Mom and Dad from time to time. Played with lightning bolts of sheer evil, James Coburn's interpretation of the film's heinous villain imbues the domestic drama with notions of sheer horror and sadistic treachery. Viewers will find themselves at seat's edge each time he winds up to deliver his completely unpredictable brand of vitriol. Unlike lonely Frankenstein or poor misunderstood Dracula, Coburn's monster has absolutely no redeeming qualities.
While profound and dramatically educating, Schrader's powerful anatomy of a social issue possesses a very curious flaw: to no obvious advantage, the filmmaker tips his hand right at the outset by allowing the narrator to intimate Wade's ultimate fate. Still, even with the suspense quotient diminished, the horrific lessons of Affliction will plague you for quite some time to come.
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