The Basics of Philosophy

Well, Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt is no longer the most aged-out film about sexual assault and generational angst set on a college campus.

That dubious honour goes to this dreary Paul Schrader effort about a philosophy professor who finds his rational framework for understanding the world is no cure for being a deeply flawed person. Is change possible, it wonders? Well, Schrader once wrote Taxi Driver and now he’s writing characters who grumble about how young people don’t appreciate Orson Welles enough. So, yes it is – although not always in a good way.

The professor, Dr John Jorrisen, is played by a tweedy and punctilious Jack Huston, who finds his students a slack and uninquisitive bunch. In fairness, he’s distracted and lacking spark himself, and he seems to lecture entirely in rhetorical questions. He has a book on the go, about 17th century European philosopher Baruch Spinoza, and a situationship with a beautiful psychology professor (Climax’s Sofia Boutella) that’s going flat in the glass. There’s a connection between them, and he gets on with her teenage son, but something is holding him back. 

Schrader takes his merry time getting to what that thing is, sketching out endless scenes of people going to coffee shops for Serious Chats like a man determined to fill in a loyalty card. Jorrisen’s old-school patriarch dad (Bill Pullman) is eventually introduced on his deathbed before we flash back, via some horrible de-ageing and oversaturated black-and-white, to the cause of his guilt and remorse: John’s interactions with a young undocumented teenager, Miguel Vasque, the son of his dad’s gardener. It’s the rock he can’t get out from under, and the appearance of the grown-up Miguel at his father’s funeral brings all that tumult spilling to the surface, albeit in sluggish and uninteresting ways.

Even a distracting cameo from Richard Gere can’t shake lethargy

With a score that occasionally goes full sleazy jazz and telenovela performances across the board, The Basics of Philosophy shares one or two ingredients with overheated thrillers of the ’90s. Back then, though,you’d have had an evil twin or murderous lovechild and it would have been silly and fun. This is stolid, inert and self-serious. Even distracting cameos from Richard Gere and Spinoza (yes, the actual 17th century philosopher) can’t shake the lethargy. Gere comes out the better by dint of getting the film’s funniest line – a low bar – and not being from an entirely different timeline. Neither speak to a film that’s confident of what it’s trying to be.

In exploring the limited scope for absolution offered by a secular, rationalist worldview, there’s actually a really interesting idea buried in the dust. But Schrader leaves hanging the idea that John may not be worthy of forgiveness; and that rather than a single sin, he’s capable of others. The conflation of sexual misconduct and closeted homosexuality feels problematic in a film where queer culture is depicted negatively and the victim (played as an adult by Daniel Zovatto) is kept on the fringes. You can usually expect rigour and dramatics from a Schrader film. This one has neither.

The Basics of Philosophy premiered at the Venice Film Festival.