Auto Focus | Review

Schrader shows Hogan as a Zero.

With a sincere look into the auto-destruction of a television face, writer/director Paul Schrader digs into the scandalous Hollywood coffin of juicy celebrity stories to expose a personality who liked to be ‘exposed’ himself.

Auto Focus is the rise and fall story of actor Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear-Nurse Betty), showing one man’s dark descent into his addiction. Using his television screen smile at the height of the television’s show popularity, Hogan must learn to deal with the demons in his closet. With the swinging seventies in full swing, the initial clean-cut family man with his stash of porn, or love of for ‘photography’ and of ‘nature’ as he calls it is, gets drawn into his sex addiction by his tech-friendly buddy John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe-Spider-Man), who makes him a star in other types of films called ‘home movies’. His new passion becomes an obsession, as the entire film deals with a lifestyle that sidetracks him from everything that counts. A failed career and failed marriages are the result of a life lived by the inspirational notion that “a day without sex is…a day wasted”.

Besides the accurate sense of décor and feel for the era, the only bright spots are the performances found with Kinnear and Dafoe, who play incredibly well off of each other allowing the viewer to feel the shallow relationship and the strain between the two, the only problem is that these characters are utterly boring to the extent that it reeks of major ennui. Schrader commences by showing the protagonist in a light of likeability and then uses shadowy composed clinic hotel rooms and poor camera angles to show the impact of excess. Kinnear portrays a Crane from both sides of the spectrum, but then we have an awful breaking-point moment like the scene that sees the actor on the set where he loses himself in the fantasy world of urges, the sequence says a lot more about the poor story denouement and a poorly composed idea that looks like a second-grade stage play. When Crane ultimately goes the cold-turkey route and detaches the umbilical cord in the relationship, Schrader creatively chooses to add his commentary, keeping the mystery intact with the finger pointed at the most obvious suspect. Cinematographer Fred Murphy contributes to the atmospheric detail of the picture giving depth to the shift towards the darker-toned moments, but overall the expose of the star that falls from the sky comes off a little bit clichéd.

Auto Focus is a safe-bet of a picture, but is ultimately, hard to enjoy as a viewer, not that I need some uplifting pleasant ending, but Schrader’s 1997 stroke of genius with the drama Affliction took on a lot more emotional weight which benefits the viewer in the long run. Despite the praise that I have for Schrader and his overall body of work, this feature should be passed on.

Rating 1.5 stars