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Regus London Film Festival 2002 |
Auto
Focus |
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Toby Marshall |
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Auto Focus dramatises the sorry life and even sorrier death of Bob Crane, one time star of the US sit-com Hogan’s Heroes. It opens in a tacky, technicolor California. It’s 1964 and Crane (Greg Kinnear) is hosting a successful breakfast radio show. At first glance, he appears to personify the values of 60s light-entertainment. His humour is clean and his manner is breezy. He’s family man and his greatest self-professed asset is his ‘likeability’. On being cast as the lead in Hogan’s Heroes, however, it becomes clear that Bob Crane has darker passions. Whilst working on the production, he encounters a seasoned LA swinger by the name of John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe) who introduces him to a world in which he can express his frustrated musical and sexual desires. Soon, Bob is getting regular evening gigs as a jazz drummer, as he has a modicum of talent, as well as the necessary star appeal. For the briefest of moments, Bob expresses concern about the moral risks associated with his nocturnal pursuits. He consults the family priest, who advises that he should remove himself from the ‘occasion of sin’, but by this stage it’s too late as the gyrations of the go-go girls have caught his eye. Before long, Bob joins John in regular sexual adventures and the duo make for a remarkably effective team. Bob’s got celebrity status, which attracts the party girls, whilst John’s superior sharking technique always ensure the desired result. Carpy, as Bob calls him, even photographs and videos the proceedings in order that they might get further pleasure from watching their performances. By the time Bob’s first wife discovers the celluloid evidence, he is changed man and he scarcely seems to care about the consequences of his actions. She leaves and he hardly pauses for thought. Even the loss of an initially more obliging second wife, as well as repeated warnings from his anxious agent, do little to check his desperate philandering, which Schrader films in a progressively more grainy, bleached and disjointed style. Auto Focus is concerned with the way in which initially rather minor transgressions, couple with changed circumstances, can alter one’s moral perspective. At the start, Bob Crane is an upright American, with a minor interest in pornography. This establishes the conditions of his downfall, as when he becomes a player in a more permissive, celebrity-centred world, he finds that he’s in a position to act out his fantasies. But what starts as sport soon, and rather too seamlessly, becomes an overwhelming and degenerate obsession. Unfortunately, Paul Schrader’s account of Bob Crane’s miserable life lacks the dramatic intensity, wit and style that characterises his more accomplished work. Whilst Dafoe’s offers a subtle and layered portrayal as the needy Carpenter, Kinnear’s Bob Crane fails to engage, primarily because Schrader never really explores his inner workings. By the end of the film Bob Crane has torched every last bridge on the road to his own private sex-hell, but without the internal conflicts that might have taken the viewer with him. UK cinema release date: March 2003 (tbc)
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