The Walker

The Walker (2007, Paul Schrader)
It's easy to present a mood of stylish decadence with romantic underpinnings when you use a Bryan Ferry song repeatedly throughout, and while Schrader is at times a definite stylist -- and while this film heavily recalls the sharp atmospherics of "Light Sleeper," even though the plot bears closer similarity to "American Gigolo" -- his film, though certainly intended to incorporate the disillusionment of the public with the avarice of behind-the-scenes politicos, comes across as an anachronism in film form. Woody Harrelson's performance as "The Walker," a specialized social position of "walking" rich women from place to place, is the kind of leisurely Southern put-on that we'd look for in noirs of the '50s, and the obscureness of his job -- and, I assume, its diminishing role in the current high-class landscape -- belongs in old Hollywood. Schrader's bordering-on-obsessional interest in homosexuality, like Neil Jordan's, continues to permeate his work; I don't mean it as a criticism, because Schrader clearly takes it seriously and there's nothing in his film or his sensibility that could be accused of being derisive or exploitive, although certainly his version of homosexuality is of the rough, manly steaminess of the '70s, however fussy of a dresser Harrelson's walker may be.