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Factotum (2005)

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From Time Out London

The first English-language feature from Norwegian writer-director Bent Hamer may be an unlikely follow-up to ‘Kitchen Stories’, but it’s no less wise, warm and wonderful. An updated adaptation of Charles Bukowski’s novel, it centres on a terrific, possibly career-best performance from Matt Dillon as Bukowski’s largely autobiographical hero Henry Chinaski, a slob of a man who’s hired and fired from one undemanding job after another because of his inability to focus long on anything but bouts of boozing, gambling and sex with women as libidinous and devoted to hooch as himself. Between times he occasionally works on becoming a writer – he’s forever sending short stories to publishers, and equally often receiving rejection notes – but mostly he’s in a bar, in a brawl, at the track or in the sack with dames as different and determined as Jan (Lili Taylor) and Laura (Marisa Tomei).

The first half of Hamer’s film is near-perfect: the dry visual and verbal gags, the unsentimental acknowledgement of life’s hardships and injustices, the tender generosity to characters are all virtues in themselves, but also ensure an unusually pleasing fidelity to the peculiar spirit of Bukowski’s writing and world-view. Appropriately, the movie’s blessed with a real love of language, evident not only in some deliciously absurd dialogue (an interviewer asks Chinaski, ‘Why do you want to work in a pickle factory?’), but also in the protagonist’s reflective voice-over. And though the second half has minor flaws (the strangely brisk curtailment of the fling with Laura, for example), it’s still marvellously funny and perceptive. The interplay between Dillon and Taylor really comes into its own here, and the narrative, hitherto so wondrously laidback as to feel a little episodic, begins to tighten into something vaguely resembling a manifesto illustrating Chinaski’s existential desire to go all the way. The film may be more modest in its ambitions – but achieves just as much anyway. Just terrific.

Author: GA

Time Out London Issue 1839: November 16-23 2005

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