Review: Factotum

Why are drunken, randomly-employed, ill-shaven sociopaths - in a low-rent sort of way - deemed to be (in brief episodic bursts) so very entertaining?

Worse, why does every two-bit "writer" model themselves on the ill-starred yet-famous Charles Bukowski?

And why is it that when arty, highbrow film-makers want to make a European-type film, they turn to his dingy-but-sex-filled life - biopic as malignant biopsy - to glorify his sad-sack existenz, shuffling about low-lit rooms with tapioca-stained wallpaper peeling away to expose infested walls while lounge music plays from 50s-era radios?

Factotum isn't a good movie, okay. But it is the perfect one to watch on TV (via DVD say) any given late evening, when drunk, bored, alone or on riveting decongestant tablets that create on-off headaches; one soon adapts, merging with the neon, the fleabag hotels, the gin parlours. It is, perhaps due to its nature, part-repellent, part-winning. It is hugely watchable, as sleaze can be.

Bukowski - as pictured in this film (just now released theatrically in America) and portrayed brilliantly by Matt Dillon (the subject of a loving recent New York Times piece) - hit a woman (which is a criminal offense); drove drunk (ditto); and smoked on the job, when not drinking. He also (not a crime but a sin) assumed himself to be a genius with a capital G - a sort of Van Gogh with two ears, one prick, and no money. He also, when paid to deliver a van of ice, let it melt, for no good reason, and never tucked in his shirts if he could help it.

In short, despite his E. Hemingway beard and handsome-if-blotched features, he was a royal pain in the Asquith. He is the sort of man, who, had blogs existed when he dawdled through the world, would have written more than one, not sober.

There is nothing heroic about having many crummy jobs - hell, I was once a copy-boy for a year. Nor is there any thing noble about getting drunk during daylight hours (perhaps the film's best scene is a set-up/pay-off on that very idea). But writing - well or okay - and getting published, well, that deserves a drink.

I hope the 78,000 rank amateur no-goodniks who can't scribe their way out of a paperbag won't see this movie (filmed with Montreal, my old stomping grounds, doing a Novak and doubling as vertiginous San Fran) and think doing serious time in shabby strip clubs with a stubby pencil and frayed yellow legal pad is a one-way trip to the Nobel Prize - but I do hope someone makes more of these sorts of movies, every once in a flickering blue moon.