The antithesis of the chick flick isn’t The Dirty Dozen or some Playboy Channel meat-flogger; it’s the work of Paul Schrader, the man who gave voices to Travis Bickle and Jake LaMotta. The rabid loners Schrader scripted in Taxi Driver and Raging Bull are among the most archetypal antiheroes in American movies, men who carry the Westerner’s code of machismo to punishing extremes. And yet the ideal Schrader hero may have been the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, the subject of Schrader’s fine 1985 biopic Mishima: a man obsessed with might and masculinity; a man thus driven to violent and ultimately self-destructive acts; a man who wrote of beauty so blindingly intense it hurt like a toothache—and hence had to be ripped from the world.

At the other end of the macho spectrum is Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte), the hard-luck lawman at the center of Schrader’s haunting new drama Affliction. The lame-duck peacekeeper in a dying New Hampshire town, Wade’s the kind of guy who became a cop for the worst of reasons—because he needed something to give him power over other people. Yet even that doesn’t work. The few moneyed residents treat him as a joke; his marriage has fallen apart, and with it his relationship to his young daughter. He doesn’t have much beauty in his life, apart from the waitress, Margie (Sissy Spacek), who inexplicably loves him. But he does have a toothache.

Adapted from the novel by Russell Banks, Affliction appears early on to be a murder mystery. A prominent union boss died of a gunshot wound on a hunting trip with Wade’s buddy Jack (Jim True); Wade suspects his pal of murder and a town-wide cover-up. The truth turns out to be much more disturbing. As Wade’s life disintegrates, he’s sucked back into the company of his vicious father, played with loathsome brio by James Coburn, whose only legacy is a sucker punch when his boy isn’t looking. Wade’s brother Rolfe (Willem Dafoe) managed to escape his dad’s brutal beat-or-get-beaten influence to a normal, if benumbed, life far away. There’s no escape for Wade.

And none for us. The movie’s pace may be glacial, but Schrader’s control and restraint throughout is relentless. Other Schrader dramas, like Hardcore and Light Sleeper, peter out in bloodsoaked big finishes that play like the director’s own ritualistic dick-swinging fantasies. Affliction is cold, and it cuts to the bone. When the murder-mystery structure vanishes, so does the hope of catharsis or resolution; when Wade finally snaps, the violence is handled with an icy plainness that rebukes the hyped-up melodrama of Schrader’s pulpier work. We hope that Wade will find a way out of his daddy’s chain of pain—the “affliction” of the title—even though the movie’s very first line of narration tells us he doesn’t.

The weight of the Whitehouses’ hand-me-down hatred hangs heavily on Nick Nolte’s large frame; his performance as Wade is a gripping study in whipped-dog anguish. Nolte’s rugged features and linebacker’s build recall the rough-hewn leading men of Westerns past—men like Robert Ryan and Sterling Hayden—so it’s more shocking, more naked and pathetic, when he displays the kind of vulnerability he had in The Prince of Tides and Afterglow. Here, he’s always shrinking from expected blows; Wade can’t even muster the authority to make a businessman’s son-in-law accept a speeding ticket. Nolte has never been better than he is standing in front of the jerk’s slammed door, holding the ticket like an exploded cigar.

Only when Wade has popped his last balloon does he get his father’s curse of a blessing. “You done it like a man done it,” the old son-of-a-bitch crows, “the way I taught you.” That’s the burden Paul Schrader’s macho heroes all have to carry—doing it like a man—and Wade pays for it. Wade thinks if he yanks out his throbbing tooth it’ll end his suffering; he gets some booze and a pair of pliers. For the only moment in the movie, Nolte’s face registers a flicker of relief: His momentary peace is all that passes for beauty in Affliction’s harsh climate. And then the pain starts up again.

—Jim Ridley

Parental guidance

Three years ago Kolya, a Czech film about a playboy cellist who becomes the unwilling caretaker of an abandoned child, won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Now Central Station, a Brazilian film with a similar plot outline, has gone its predecessor one better, earning a nomination not only in the foreign language category but also for its leading lady, Fernanda Montenegro. Both films show how each kid’s plight melts the heart of his surrogate parent. But while Kolya adopted a lightly comic tone before tugging at the heartstrings, Central Station reaches for religious symbolism and stark, dramatic redemption.

Montenegro plays Dora, a spinster who writes letters for the illiterate travelers who pass through Rio de Janeiro’s cavernous train station. She then passes judgment on the senders and their intended recipients by tearing the letters up or stashing them in her apartment. When one of her customers is hit and killed by a bus after dictating a letter to her son’s absent father, Dora takes in the orphaned boy, Josue. Eventually, they wind up on a bus to the Brazilian hinterland in search of his father, a reported drunkard named Jesus who lives in a town housing a popular Catholic shrine.

Josue isn’t the standard-issue cutie of lost-child movies; he’s old enough to reject the hypocrisy he sees when Dora sells him to a foreign adoption racket, then remorsefully retrieves him. But he’s young enough to cling defiantly to his image of Jesus, his father, as a talented carpenter who will welcome Josue into his family and reward Dora for her trouble. Dora, who reveals her own orphaned childhood, takes it upon herself to shatter Josue’s idealistic illusions. And that’s not hard, when a series of unfortunate circumstances leaves them penniless and hungry, still miles from their goal.

Not all of the religious subtext here is immediately obvious, but it is clear that this movie has a religious theme: Dora and Josue ride with an evangelical truck driver, encounter pilgrims singing to the Virgin Mary, and search for a carpenter named Jesus who is said to have vanished into the wilderness. In the end it comes down to the prototypical leap of faith: to believe in an absent savior, and to offer yourself, in his service, to your neighbor in need. When Dora leaves her cynicism behind to embrace that kind of love, she achieves redemption, just as we might expect from the formula of accidental-adoption movies.

But Central Station doesn’t envision her transformation as simply the melting of a crusty heart. It asks whether a child’s faith should provide the model for finding salvation—even for those who believe harsh realism is the key to survival. And it finds that the absent Father to whom all kinds of Christians pray absents Himself so that we can be caretakers of our world, recognizing that our parenthood does not take His place so much as prepare for His return.

—Donna Bowman

Lighting the way

As much as cinephiles love to talk about the all-encompassing creative power of the director (with occasional nods to the screenwriter or cinematographer), the fact is that the Hollywood machine is still run on star power. Which isn’t always bad—a great performance can frequently elevate the run-of-the-mill.

Consider Message in a Bottle, a mild adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ best-selling novel. Robin Wright Penn stars as a divorced mother of one working in a newspaper research department. On a jog, she finds a bottle containing a letter written by a soulful Outer Banks boat restorer who pines for his dead wife. Kevin Costner plays the widower solidly, if unspectacularly. The revelation of the film is Penn, who gives her first real lead performance in a career of quirky co-leads and brooding supporting turns. She focuses her own personality through the demands of the plot, in the classic Hepburn-Davis “woman’s picture” style.

Message in a Bottle is slow and manipulative, with corny dialogue, but Penn’s emotional range—from insecure to sexy to shattered—all but overcomes the picture’s inherent shallowness. As she carefully angles to supplant a saintly memory, we watch a stock character come alive, and Message in a Bottle seems less cloyingly obvious than pleasingly familiar—at least until its interminably bathetic final half-hour.

Blast From the Past also features a charismatic lead in a gimmick-laden story. Brendan Fraser plays a man who has spent the first 35 years of his life in a bomb shelter before emerging into contemporary Los Angeles. Director Hugh Wilson and screenwriter Bill Kelly score some satirical (albeit underdeveloped) points off a literally nuclear family, and off the way the retro Fraser fits into a retro-obsessed world.

The film’s biggest weakness is the inappropriate casting of prissy Alicia Silverstone as a world-weary collectibles expert who captures Fraser’s affection; but fortunately Fraser occupies the picture’s core with a rare sweetness and openness. He belies his big, handsome presence with a willingness to look silly. He’s like an overstuffed teddy bear, and we worry that the ’90s will crush his spirit. Blast From the Past plays out in too pat a fashion, but even when the writer and director seem short of ideas, Fraser is still raring. We follow him even when he has no one to follow.

—Noel Murray