Thursday

The Walker feels stilted and staged at points. The dialogue is exceptionally good - to the level of theatre almost - but it strains and occasionally feels artificial. Perhaps this is the performances, not of Woody Harrelson himself who was excellent, but the three women - Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin, and Kristin Scott Thomas - who I think it would be apt to say 'phoned in' their performances, though I'm not sure. They don't seem natural. The story concerns a gay man who accompanies high society women in Washington to dinner, theatre, etc. when their husbands are away, or even if they're not. He is their confidant and socialite, catching and spreading gossip. Someone he knows is killed, and as soon as he is implicated in the murder, all his friends start to abandon him to avoid scandal on themselves. I didn't think this story, or this character, needed such extreme circumstances (life and death) to show us who he was. It would've been interesting to do a film without any dramatic events - the death when it happened seemed absurd, and the rest of the plot turns into a bit of an ordinary detective story. What was good, though, was that it gave no explanations for itself. The film began, with no introductions, and let you decide what you thought of this man. At first I disliked him, but gradually grew to respect him. There were some awfully staged moments - the kiss through the iron bars - but also some brilliant ones. The music was out of touch with the emotion being displayed, and the direction was bad, giving us jilted camera-angles and awkward zooms at pivotal moments. These two combined made it at times (and in the beginning) feel like a TV movie. I sometimes thought, although this is a harsh judgement, that this was just a film directed by a writer. Paul Schrader has done better than that here, but there is room for improvement I think. Like I said, it is good almost to the point of being theatre, and when it resolves itself at the end you feel like you've just watched a play, which perhaps isn't a bad thing.