A lone man sits at his desk reflecting on existence. Paul Schrader’s is an idiosyncratic and nomadic oeuvre, but whether set in the desolate, brain-grey landscapes of upstate New York, the city’s putrid underbelly, or the lush mansions dotting the American South, this is where his films inevitably bring you back: a solitary figure writing and ruminating in voiceover, often at night, always alone. No image has haunted the director quite like this. It’s a signature moment, the kind of scene that can reveal the man behind it more flagrantly than any other, and trigger thrills of recognition among aficionados. There are tweaks, naturally. In First Reformed (2017)—the opening chapter in a contemporary trilogy centered on “God’s lonely men”—Ethan Hawke’s Reverend Toller spent his nights filling up a diary, pen and paper; in The Basics of Philosophy—a film ostensibly outside the triptych but thematically connected to it in myriad ways—professor John Jorrisen (Jack Huston) types at his laptop. The technology differs; the asphyxiating loneliness does not.
First Reformed, in which Hawke played a pastor who embraces environmental activism in response to a spiritual crisis, was one of Schrader’s undisputed masterpieces, but the rest of the trilogy succumbed to the law of diminishing returns. The following instalments—The Card Counter (2021) and Master Gardener (2022)—could only fitfully match its visceral power and simmering rage. The Basics of Philosophy doesn’t revert this trend. Its pleasures are confined to auteurist legibility. Anyone familiar with the director’s motifs will find plenty of echoes here, and may relish connecting the old with the new. New, not fresh, for a kind of staleness hangs over it. Like its predecessors, The Basics of Philosophy is obsessed with our mortality—it’s a film in which characters seem governed by a memento mori, none more than its protagonist. But of Schrader’s most recent, this rings strangely inert—a work that, in harking back to concerns the director’s addressed more emphatically and convincingly elsewhere, stands as an odd facsimile.
There’s a man in a room, and another who hovers over the film as a specter. John, a philosophy professor at the fictional Ridgemont University, is hard at work on a book on Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century philosopher who preached a life of reason as the sole escape from the tyranny of passions, and believed one could examine ideas the way one might study geometry. So intrigued by all this is professor Jorrisen that he’d rather stay home to toil on his passion project than enjoy some privacy with professor Rebecca Richards (Sofia Boutella), a co-worker he’s been seeing for a while—a liaison more platonic than sexual. “Philosophers,” she scoffs after the umpteenth chaste date. “You overthink things.”
You could say that about all of Schrader’s verbose heroes—as prone to acts of self-flagellation as they are to sprawling soliloquies about their horrific backstories. The blackjack prodigy at the center of The Card Counter was an Iraq veteran who served as a torturer at Abu Ghraib; the titular horticulturalist in Master Gardener was a former neo-Nazi who wore long-sleeved clothes to hide a body covered in swastikas and Celtic crosses. Like them, John is a man with a dark secret. When he worked as a piano teacher, he sexually abused a 14-year-old student; the boy was the son of an undocumented migrant from Mexico, which made it easier for John’s affluent father (Bill Pullman) to pay the family in exchange for their silence. But no sooner did John’s father die that the lad, now thirtysomething Miguel (Daniel Zovatto), suddenly resurfaces. The past is a foreign country until it isn’t.
None of this is new ground for Schrader. The Basics of Philosophy essentially follows the same dramatic arc he’s honed over 50 years and 20-plus features: from sin to atonement to salvation. John wakes up to the horrors he’s repressed, proceeds to punish himself by retreating deeper into his hermit-like existence (all while scouting the dark web for a way to end things), and finally obtains redemption. What is novel is the film’s tendency to trumpet its ideas lest we should somehow get lost in all the chatter. No need to fear: The Basics of Philosophy is legible to a fault. When Schrader’s script doesn’t traffic in declarative statements (“forgiveness is possible!” says Pullman) the writings on the whiteboard hanging right behind John in his lecture hall reiterate the film’s concepts like a study guide: Why should I live? Is change possible?
Schrader, who owes his artistic awakening to a screening of Bresson’s Pickpocket—the film that’s served as template for several of his own—has concerned himself with these dilemmas ever since he sent Travis Bickle roaming the streets of New York in the 1970s. But in The Basics of Philosophy, those worries ring stiff, as if John’s musings on Spinoza didn’t come from a drifter trying to find meaning and solace in someone else’s weltanschauung but from a SparkNotes-level summary of it, sound bites that do little to expand the man’s inner life or his muse’s worldview.
There’s no denying the brazenness with which Schrader handles his highly flammable script: the unspeakable violence behind John’s guilt, for one, makes the border between his homosexuality and pedophilia dangerously blurry. But the film, notwithstanding a committed turn from Huston, struggles to make its material catch fire. In The Basics of Philosophy, yet another man sits at his desk, writing to confess and find absolution for his deeds. But the silence around him is louder than usual.
The Basics of Philosophy premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival.
The post Venice Review: Paul Schrader’s The Basics of Philosophy Is Too Inert to Catch Fire first appeared on The Film Stage.
from The Film Stage https://ift.tt/2wXrLpR
0 Comments