Hardcore ★★★½
PAUL Schrader is the writer behind a canon of intriguing and powerful male screen characters.
Robert De Niro in Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, Richard Gere in American Gigolo, Willem Dafoe in Light Sleeper, Nick Nolte in Affliction, Nicholas Cage in Bringing out the Dead, Ethan Hawke in First Reformed, Oscar Isaac in The Card Counter and Joel Edgerton in the coming Master Gardener.
Schrader’s men are complex and flawed individuals, moral but not always ethical, fighting to control their personal demons.
One of his lesser known, but just as strong, creations is the character of Jake Van Dorn, played by the great George C. Scott in 1979’s Hardcore, which Schrader also directed.
Set initially in Grand Rapids Michigan, we are introduced to widower Van Dorn and his teenage daughter Kristen. The successful operator of a local timber mill, he is also very conservative and a devout worshipper at the local Calvinist Church.
Kristen and a girlfriend join a church-sponsored trip to California but disappears after a few days. With local police too busy and sceptical to mount the kind of search that Van Dorn is demanding, he hires a Los Angeles private investigator to help locate his daughter.
Andy Mast, played wonderfully by Peter Boyle, is the total opposite of Van Dorn; a cynical and streetwise operator who thinks nothing of shocking Van Dorn with his language and attitudes during their first meeting.
After five months Mast suddenly turns up in Van Dorn’s town and shows him a pornographic video in which his daughter is having sex with two men. Van Dorn is of course shattered and completely concerned for his daughter’s welfare.
He insists on joining Mast back in Los Angeles to help search for Kristen but, after a falling-out with the morally loose investigator, Van Dorn embarks on a lone odyssey that takes him deep into the world of pornography, prostitution, drug dealing and on-screen murder.
Along the way he enlists the aid of Niki (Season Hubley) a young female prostitute, stripper and part-time porn actress who has come across Kristen and thinks she can help rescue her, seemingly seeing herself in the young victim.
Like his great collaborator Martin Scorcese, Schrader studied theology and brings his deep interest in the clash of faith and morality with societal freedoms to all his films. The uncomfortable dialogue between Van Dorn and Mant and Van Dorn and Niki lay bare these themes but perhaps don’t examine them as well as some of Schrader’s other films.
The first and second acts of the films are very strong, but the final act starts to become a little too cliched until being saved by a devastating climax.
Schrader had problems throughout the filming. The original lead actor, Warren Beatty, left after creative differences and the notoriously difficult Scott clashed on-set with his equally alpha male director.
Scott, who had famously refused his Bast Actor Academy Award for Patton, went on to publicly call Schrader a terrible director and Hardcore “a piece of shit.”
That view was shared by some critics at the time, but most saw many positives which have seen the film grow in stature over the subsequent decades. It’s ripe for a good remake by somebody as fearless as Schrader.