““Affliction’’–which is narrated by Wade’s brother, Rolfe (Willem Dafoe)–unfolds, deceptively, as a murder mystery. A wealthy man is shot and killed while deer hunting in the snowy woods. Wade doesn’t think it was an accident. He becomes obsessed with the crime, finding evidence of a conspiracy that involves his own boss. As long as he can stay focused on the crime, he doesn’t have to look at the wreckage of his own life, which is spiraling out of control.
Nolte presides over this movie like a raging, wounded animal. He’s at once dangerous and doomed, threatening and pitiable. You can see why his daughter is afraid of him, why his new girlfriend (Sissy Spacek) must tread carefully around him. But Nolte and Schrader allow us to see the terrified little boy inside Wade, the inheritor of a tradition of violence that has been passed on from father to son for generations. Nolte gives this blighted man an almost tragic stature. The unexpected casting of Coburn is inspired: fathers don’t get much scarier or meaner than this.
This may be the finest work Schrader has done. There’s nothing flashy about his style here. Quietly, relentlessly, he burrows deep inside this place, these people. But the grittily realistic, seemingly objective style slowly takes on the intensity of a cold fever. By the end of this paranoid American nightmare, ““Affliction’’ has achieved an almost hallucinatory power. Schrader has never been one to coddle an audience, and this is as uncompromising a vision as he has given us. That’s both warning and strong recommendation.
