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Auto Focus tries hard
to overcome what is an inherent flaw… Bob Crane wasn’t
all that special. And
if he was, the film doesn’t do a lot to convince us of that.
Poop Shooter Jeff Wells tells me that Paul
Schrader is already quite open about the fact that he
really didn’t have any respect for Crane as an artist or as
a human being. But
think… when is the last time you saw a good movie about a
mediocrity. There
is nothing harder to do successfully.
You can make movies about losers and you can make movies
about winners, but the vanilla middle is only good for Oreos
and pudding.
The production
design on Auto Focus is quite excellent.
And the performances are passable and better.
Willem Dafoe gets to play a new variation of
creep and as usual, he brings the role more than it deserves.
Greg Kinnear, who I never have seen as anything
more than a TV level performer, gives a TV level performance
portraying a TV level performer. Nothing wrong with that. But it doesn’t make for a very good movie.
There are
ways, I think, of building a movie around Bob Crane.
But that movie has to have a far stronger point of
view than Crane’s la-dee-da.
Is he a victim of success?
Is he a bumbler who got lucky? Is he a faithful husband who can’t hold up
to the tests that fame forces on him?
Was he always just one step away from “the dark side”…
a car wreck just waiting to happen?
Or was he, as the film almost suggests, a pioneer of
sexual freedom who got burnt out by the lifestyle, but was
a true rebel without his pants?
But as an
audience, you never really get a view of a Bob Crane
you care about at all. He seems to be a hokey, mediocre disk jockey
that lucks into the lead of a show where the supporting comedy
Nazis did all the heavy lifting, and eventually decides to
play drums with mediocre strip club bands which leads to sex
which coincides with the advent of videotape and eventually
leads to his demise. Are
you still awake?
I went back
to see Auto Focus a second time because I wasn’t sure
that I was giving it as much love as it deserved the first
time around. And in
the same week, I was seeing Frida a first and then
a second time. And
the similarities really hit home.
Both films are about men whose first marriages failed
because of their sexual appetites before they found women
who were stronger than them and accepted who they really were…
until the men went too far.
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