33/17
The ‘Loser’ written by Russell Banks
Leonard Fife, one of the 60,000 draft dodgers and deserters who fled to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam, shares all his secrets to demystifying his mythologized life. This is the second time Paul Schrader has directed one of Banks’ novels to the screen, following the adaptation of Affliction (1997). Link in the Film Junk podcast: Episode 961: Violent in Nature + TIFF 2024 (2024). Richard Gere is a renowned producer of hard and bloody documentaries. He works with his wife and producer Uma Thurman. He fled the United States many years ago to protest the Vietnam War.
There are filmmakers and there are directors
It is now 2023, he is dying and several of his students are making a documentary, interviewing him about the protests, under the watchful eye of his producer and wife, Uma Thurman. Schrader is a careful writer and there are many ways to interpret this film. Some critics have called it “autobiographical.” because they are so intellectually lazy that they don’t bother to think about it more than once before giving up. There may be some autobiographical elements in this film. The film certainly reflects Schrader’s opinion, not that of a panda or a large chunk of rock scraped off the Laurentian Shield and dumped into a moraine at the end of Long Island. I guess that doesn’t make it autobiographical, any more than the fact that the guy is a filmmaker.
There are certainly aspects to that
Although Gere and the people who made the film within the film want to make a sensational film at all costs, Miss Thurman’s only desire is to protect her husband, even though she already knows the worst. he considered it a meditation on filmmaking. A filmmaker shoots far more footage than he needs and edits it into a final form that may have no relation to reality or the filmmaker’s original intentions. As Gere dies on camera and throughout the film, the events of his life that he wants to tell become confused and out of place, confused and confused with each other. To understand this, to make a film out of it, since the guys in the film already have a contract to sell the film, you will need an editor. This is the real job of any storyteller: to organize the events and characters of a story in a way that makes sense to the audience.
public to sort it out
But much more important to understanding this film is to see it, like the rest of Schraeder’s work. work, this applies primarily to indignation. In some ways, his work is similar to that of Ingmar Bergman: he was raised religiously and reflected on human fallibility in a world where there is no God to provide an objective framework for good and evil: misunderstanding and disappointment, leaving it up to man. moral system. Schraeder, on the other hand, seems exasperated, full of despair, and leaves the mess to the hapless survivors. Gere leaves it up to the filmmakers to make sense of his interview, and for Ms.
And it’s not Schraeder
Thurman to clean up the mess and lies she’s brought with her from her life. It’s not Gere’s problem: he’s dead. Anyway, here are a couple of ways to watch the movie that I’ve come up with. If you see the movie, even if you haven’t seen a single explosion or a good line, let me know if it makes sense. And if you have different interpretations.