Wade Whitehouse is frightened to death of following in his father\'s footsteps. <BR>&nbsp;

Wade Whitehouse is frightened to death of following in his father\'s footsteps.

It`s winter in the little North American township of Lawson. Wade Whitehouse, Nick Nolte, the town`s only cop, is in a bitter mood. His wife left him because of his drunkeness and bouts of temper, his little girl clearly doesn`t want to be with him, his mistress, Margie Fogg, Sissy Spacek, tolerates him, most of the townspeople despise him. While Wade becomes involved in the fatal shooting of an out-of-town deer hunter, his past catches up with him - and the past looms large in the figure of his monstrous, brutal father, Glen, James Coburn... Paul Schrader`s very fine film is based on a novel by Russell Banks, who also wrote The Sweet Hereafter, and similarly deals with small-town angst. But Schrader, who himself grew up in what seems to have been a pretty terrible household, is inspired by this bleak material. His portrait of two supposedly strong men, father and son, who are actually utterly weak and self-destructive, is almost Shakespearian in its density, and the film is distinguished by two really great performances - James Coburn, who won an Oscar for his playing of Glen, and Nick Nolte, who surely deserved one for his painful interpretation of Wade. It`s certainly a sombre film, but it deserves a wider distribution than it seems to be getting. Margaret`s comments: This is a dour film, following very much in the tradition of writer/director Paul Schrader`s previous major successes as a writer - Taxi Driver and Raging Bull - both of which focussed on a man on the edge between reality and madness. Affliction is really a very similar story and once again it contains a powerhouse central performance, this time from Nick Nolte. Schrader charts ever interesting emotional and political territory. He makes no concession that this `man on the edge` is ever going to teeter into redeeming territory, it`s a doom-laden view of family and individual. No wonder Russell Banks` novel appealed so much to Schrader. Remember a Banks` novel was the inspiration for Atom Egoyan`s superb but equally bleak film The Sweet Hereafter. But for me this is a film that challenges commercial directions in film and for that, and for its skill I applaud it.