Affliction
Wade Whitehouse is a man who can barely keep his rage in check, and lashes out at those who love him because he knows no other way to relate to them. A cop in a snow-bound New Hampshire town north of Concord, he has suffered a failed marriage, he smokes pot on the job, and his own daughter fears him. But instead of making Whitehouse a reprehensible character, Affliction makes us sympathize if not excuse his actions.
We learn that his father is a raging, abusive alcoholic, and through flashback begin to see how his rough treatment of his family created Wade's inability to put his life together. The film opens with Wade taking his daughter to a Halloween party, and we see the discomfort in his daughter's eyes when faced with the prospect of spending an entire evening with him. He does not hit her, but he is emotionally unavailable and cannot speak to her without anger and frustration leaking though his facade of fatherly care. He begins a bitter custody battle over his daughter as a way to get revenge on his ex-wife; what he thinks of as a loving gesture seems nakedly jealous to us.
Nick Nolte has given many performances in the past, some good, some bad, but rarely has he been so dead-on as in his portrayal of Wade Whitehouse. Nolte nails the tense jaw, the broken posture of a man beaten by life, completely inhabiting Wade's skin and making him real. There is a hunting accident that Wade takes to be a murderer's cover-up and begins to investigate - is it a genuine investigation or a wildly misguided way to regain some self-respect in his job? The movie doesn't make it clear at first, letting us see the world through Wade's paranoiac haze. But the movie isn't about the murder investigation - it's about how the investigation makes all of Wade's history come to the fore.
Things come to a head when Wade's mother is found dead, and without that buffer between them, Wade and his father are forced to confront each other man to man. James Coburn received an Oscar for his performance as the cold, abusive father, and deservedly so. He is a large man of obvious physical power, as is Nolte, but Wade cowers before him, remembering old wounds. Their scenes together show how the legacy of pain lives on in both Wade and his brother Rolfe.
Rolfe escaped the town to become a professor at BU; where Wade is a mass of unfocused aggression, Rolfe is quiet and meek, seemingly drawing into himself, having learned to make himself inconspicuous in a household where to be seen was to be struck. "At least I escaped the affliction of violence from that man," says Rolfe. Wade looks at him incredulously and chuckles: "That's what you think."
Affliction is a powerful and disturbing film, but its power comes from the honesty it has in dealing with its subject. That, and Nolte's outstanding performance of a man disintegrating, makes the film a compellingly instructive experience. The sins of the father may be visited on the son, but sometimes, the sins of the father return to haunt him.
- Jared O'Connor
MOVIES
All Content © 1997, 1998, 1999 Jared O'Connor and Michael Baker