FACTOTUM

Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
IFC Films
Grade: B+
Directed by: Bent Hamer
Written by: Bent Hamer, Jim Stark, from Charles Bukowski’s novel “Factotum” with excerpts from his short stories
Cast: Matt Dillon, Lili Taylor, Marisa Tomei
Screened at: Broadway, NYC, 6/19/06
Opens: August 18, 2006

Mention the term “beatnik” to people in the twenties or thirties and you’ll likely get a blank stare. (Ditto for the word, “factotum,” which means “a servant who performs a variety of tasks.” And oh yes, beatniks are those who do no conform to the norm in dress or behavior. No 9-5 jobs for them.) The two terms have much in common because beatniks, who arguably were the people from the 1950s who preceded the hippies of the sixties and seventies, would bum around, take a job here, a gig there, but would live for the moment. Though Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg are the best-known of the beat writers, Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), who must have bummed around as much as Kerouac, was at least as successful as a writer, his short stories, poems and novels published in twenty languages. “Factotum,” Bukowski’s second novel (1975), is a fictionalized memoir of the writer who gives himself the name Henry Chinaski, a fellow who mails his stories to one magazine he likes, gets mostly rejections, and works some dead-end jobs including some that lasted less than a day. He also appears to appeal to the ladies, provided that they are as down-and-out as he. We carry that much away from Bent Hamer’s film, which features a tour-de-force performance from Matt Dillon–an actor who delivered a terrific job in last year’s “Crash” and now appears in virtually every scene.

We don’t see Chinaski in his job at the post office, which means that Bukowski, who originally created the guy, picked and chose the life he breathed into the bum. We do watch him get hired and fired with predictable regularity, hooking up with two women moments after meeting them in a bar, and delivering home-spun philosophy via narrations that pop up here and there throughout the pic. If Bukowski wrote principally about insanity and death, we don’t see it here. Though his alter ego, Hank Chinaski, mopes about for much of the time, he is neither suicidal nor insane. He does, however, drink, smoke, vomit and shag to give meaning to his life.

The press notes say that Bukowski once held that “An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way. An artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.” “Factotum” does indeed tell complex things about life in a simple way, and is effective, even engrossing, thanks to Dillon’s performance.

Dillon’s Chinaski boasts of his two-year tenure in a journalism school, but his resume would more accurately state that he had been arrested eighteen times for drunk-and-disorderly charges and accumulated two convictions for drunk driving. While he wraps his fingers around a cigarette and a pen, putting words on scraps of paper, his hands are made more for drinking cheap booze from a paper bag and groping the two women who seem to adore him because of his lumpenprole outlook rather than in spite of it. While he spends some time with barfly Laura (Marisa Tomei), his more meaningful liaison is with Jan (Lili Taylor), into whose shabby Minneapolis apartment he moves and with whom–if you believe Jan–he shags eight hundred times within a few months.

The warm humor that pervades the story and makes it less of a downer than Gogol’s “The Lower Depths” comes out in various work environments. Once, upon telling a factory manager that he’s a writer, he elicits this gem from for us:

Manager: “So you’re a writer? What do you write about? Cancer?
Cinaski: “Yes.”
Manager: “Women?”
Cinaski: “Yes.”
Manger: “My wife?”
Cinaski: “Yes.”
Manager: So if you’re a writer, why do you want to work in a pickle factory?

Booze is the central non-human character of the movie, the cause of his dismissals, the motivator of his alliances with women. When delivering ice by truck, he never gets past the first task. He stops in a bar for his regular Scotch, leaving the door of the truck open, thereby destroying the product. Sitting around in an agency for day laborers, he’s thrown out for drinking, though he’s warned by a fellow sitting to his right that this is the one thing not tolerated. Told by another boss that no smoking would be allowed, the first thing he does is...you guessed it. Talk about non-conformity for its own sake?

Did I mention that the role is made for Matt Dillon?

For a better look at Bukowski, an excerpt from a poem called “My Father” which he wrote in his final year, 1994:

“And because he wanted to be rich or because he actually thought he was rich
he always voted Republican
and he voted for Hoover against Roosevelt
and he lost
and then he voted for Alf Landon against Roosevelt
and he lost again...

I think it was my father who made me decide to become a bum.
I decided that if a man like that wants to be rich
then I wanted to be poor
but I found out that most of the bums wanted to be rich too."

Rated R. 94 minutes 2006 by Harvey Karten
harveycritic@cs.com Member: NY Film Critics Online