There is a scene in Barbet Schroeder's excellent 1984 film Barfly,
as Henry Chinaski (Mickey Rourke), is sitting in the upper crust home
of a publisher (Alice Krige) who has bought one of his stories for her
literary magazine. Chinaski is a skid row lifer and a proud drunk with
a talent for writing. Gazing out onto the various modern decorations
and affectations that remind the rich that they're rich, Chinaski
calls her home, "a cage with golden bars."
Such an
opinion not only sums up Henry Chinaski, but, to a lesser extent, the
man who created him, beat writer Charles Bukowski, who also wrote the
script. Unlike Chinaski, I never bought into the whole "nobility
of being poor" conceit - I imagine every poor person on Earth
would prefer being rich. But for Chinaski, deciding whether to be
happy and poor, or miserable and rich, is Barfly's main conflict.
For those who don't know (and those who don't know, should know),
Charles Bukowski was a West German-born writer who came to the United
States when he was two. In America, his overbearing, abusive father
and a disfiguring case of adolescent acne made him a loner. Since
Bukowski considered normal human contact out of his reach, he turned
to alcohol and writing. By age 40 he was taking it (and drinking) very
seriously, even if he had to supplement his income with menial jobs
such as post office clerk and elevator operator. By age 50, he was by
all accounts, a working writer whose simplicity, honesty and bite (not
to mention his ability to be dark without being apocalyptic) put him
in league with other Beat writers of his generation. As a full-bodied
and unrepentant alcoholic, Bukowski logged much time as a barfly.
Hopping from bar to bar in his beloved Los Angeles, he would drink all
night and watch lost souls flame out into a mug or shotglass full of
liquid unconsciousness. Such months form the basis of Barfly.
In the film, Mickey Rourke plays Chinaski as a man who believes that
real life experience exists only on the fringes of society. His life
reads like the back of a shampoo bottle: drink, fight, write, repeat.
Chinaski's run along the razor wire comes to a temporary halt with the
introduction of two women. Wanda (Faye Dunaway) is another barfly, a
pretty woman who wears a tattered business suit that makes you long
for the day when such a suit was put to more appropriate use. The
other woman is Tully, the magazine publisher who hires a private
detective to find this societal dropout with the poetic mind and
gutter mouth. One woman promises a life of exhilarating Hell, the
other guarantees a life of vapid and meaningless wealth.
Rourke is a ball of vocal mannerisms that I would normally rail
against. But he fully inhabits the character, a man of noble poverty
who disdainfully looks up at people the same way others disdainfully
look down. For the most part, Dunaway sheds her movie star image,
while Krige (who would later play the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First
Contact) is well cast as Tully. If it takes living on skid row and
drinking myself blind to feel alive, I'll pass. But Bukowski,
Schroeder and Rourke make you feel sorry for those who've never felt
the sublime pleasure of going absolutely crazy.
Video: How
Does The Disc Look?
Warner has finallly released Barfly in
its OAR of 1.85:1, and it's anamorphically enhanced. The results are
solid. The film takes place in the dankest corners of Los Angeles'
skid row and the color scheme reflects it. There are lots of dirty
browns and blacks, with the latter color fairly deep and consistent.
Shadow detail was nice, considering how much of the film takes place
indoors and at night. However, one or two interiors evidenced a lot of
grain. Barfly is not that colorful a picture: neon signs are about as
vibrant as the film gets. The good news is that those neon signs are a
nice, florescent red that doesn't tear or bleed. As the film goes on,
scenes take place during the day. Grass is a nice, rich green and I
found precious few specks upon the blue sky. Overall detail is good,
although parts of the picture are a bit soft. Fleshtones seemed
accurate. This is about as nice as Barfly is ever going to look.
Audio: How Does The Disc Sound?
Not much going on
here: the audio is passable Dolby Digital mono. The only good thing I
can say is the general clinking and clanking of shot glasses and beer
bottles is subtle and plentiful. Also, I heard no pops, hisses or
other audio anomalies. The film has no score, only source music and it
all shoots out of the center of the soundscape. Dialogue is a bit hard
to understand on occasion.
The DVD is dubbed in French and
includes subtitles in English, French, Spanish and Japanese.
Supplements: What Goodies Are There?
I fully expected
Warner to throw Barfly onto video store shelves as a mere movie-only
catalogue release. However, a respectable array of extras have been
included that will surely help fans of the film justify their
purchase, and even casual viewers can learn something new about
Bukowski.
First off is an interesting scene-specific audio
commentary by director Barbet Schroeder (Reversal of Fortune). The
French director speaks in a deep, thickly accented English, but he's
always understandable, speaking of how it took him seven years to get
the film made since he refused to compromise his vision. He also talks
of shooting on location in downtown Los Angeles. All the bars and
hotel rooms in the film were real and (according to Schroeder) smelled
disgusting. Gossipy tidbits are sprinkled throughout, including how he
and Rourke did not get along at the beginning of the shoot. Rourke and
the director had differing visions of the main character. Also, Rourke
insisted on a Rolls Royce to pick him up and bring him to set.
However, the two eventually clicked and after the bumpy start, Rourke
was terrific.
Next is the 12-minute featurette I Drink, I
Gamble and I Write: The Making Of Barfly, and includes behind-the-
scenes footage and interviews with Bukowski. While I applaud its
inclusion, parts of the featurette are in such bad shape that I assume
no amount of cleanup would have helped. While the BTS footage is
passable, the film clips look like they were beaten up, dragged
through the streets and stomped on by the USC marching band. Still,
anything with bites from Bukowski is worth watching. Here he tells of
how director Barbet Schroeder called him at home to convince him to
write a movie. At first, Bukowski told Schroeder to "fuck
off." Then, when he learned he'd make $20,000, he asked the
director, "when can you be over?"
The most
interesting supplement is Excerpts from Barbet Schroeder's The
Charles Bukowski Tapes. From 1982-84, while Schroeder was trying
to get Barfly off the ground, he sat down with Bukowski and recorded
hours upon hours of the two men talking. Schroeder chopped them up
into 52 segments and eventually sold them to French TV as "The
Charles Bukowski Tapes." Conversations are insightful, angry,
drunken, sarcastic, funny, tragic and always entertaining. The four
segments included on the Barfly DVD are #2: Starving for Art, #3: The
Bar in Philadelphia (where, for one night, he drank at the ultimate
dive bar), #27: The New York Agent (where he was offered
representation and turned it down) and #44: For Jane (about the death
of his on-again, off-again companion). Kudos to Warner for actually
including these on the DVD.
Lastly, there is Barfly's
theatrical trailer and credit lists for Rourke, Dunaway,
Bukowski and Schroeder.
DVD-ROM Exclusives: What do you get
when you pop the disc in your PC?
No ROM extras have been
included.
Parting Thoughts
Only a singular
talent such as Charles Bukowski could have written such a singular
film as Barfly. The film is unabashedly what is it: a dark, grimy, yet
amusing story of a man who drinks to suffer and suffers for his art.
Mickey Rourke gives an affected, yet fine performance as the surrogate
Bukowski and the script is filled with the drunken witticisms of a
truly talented skid row prophet. As for the DVD, the video is pretty
good and Barbet Schroeder's audio commentary gives the viewer a real
sense of how hard it was to get the film made. In fact, after you rent
the movie (an activity I highly recommend) go out and buy Bukowski's
novel Hollywood. It's his fictionalized account of the making of
Barfly, and every bit as fascinating as the film itself.
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