Three years after Paul
Schrader wrote the Palme d’Or winning 1976 Martin Scorsese classic Taxi Driver, the Grand Rapids, Michigan
based screenwriter revisited the scuzzy and seedy red light districts adorning Taxi Driver with his second official
effort as a writer-director: the hard-hitting drama Hardcore. Obviously the
blueprint for films like Joel Schumacher’s 8mm
as well as foreshadowing Schrader’s own obsessions with the sex industry
seen in American Gigolo, Auto Focus and The Canyons, the film plunges deep into the Los Angeles sex trade
subculture as a kind of seedy alien landscape.
The story of a conservative
family man named Jake Van Dorn (George C. Scott) from Grand Rapids who is
desperately searching for his missing daughter Kristen (Ilah Davis) after her
mysterious disappearance on a church-sponsored retreat. After hiring a private investigator named
Andy Mast (Peter Boyle), Jake discovers to his horror that Kristen appears to
have been abducted and forced into pornography.
With no help or leads from the LAPD, Jake dives headfirst into the LA
sex trade scene in attempt to find and rescue his missing daughter, acquiring
the help of a prostitute named Niki (Season Hubley) who may or may not know of
his daughter’s whereabouts.
Shot by Scorsese’s longtime
cinematographer Michael Chapman with a mournful glass harp score by Jack
Nitzsche, at the center of Hardcore is
the unlikely camaraderie shared between Jake and Niki on the hunt for his
missing daughter. Originally written for
Taxi Driver before being reshaped
into it’s own creature, Hardcore’s greatest
strength lies in the dialogue exchanged between the pair from two vastly
different walks of life who find they’ve more common mutual needs than they initially
realized. The revelations brought out in
each other represent some of the finest bits of screenwriting Schrader has ever
done, up there with the famous exchanges shared between Robert De Niro and
Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver.
Though famed Chicago based critic Roger Ebert may have been right about Hardcore’s dualistic regard for the sex trade, simultaneously abhorring and glamorizing it, the dramatic character arcs are so engrossing with a powerful and heartbreaking central performance by the great George C. Scott that you tend to forgive Schrader’s neutrality on the subject. At the heart of Schrader and Scott’s swan dive into the porn underworld is a touching human drama with fine performances by Scott and Hubley and for what it’s worth a love story evoking the fragile bonds between father and daughter. Not the first film to tackle the porn industry and certainly not the last, but it is far and away one of the most profoundly affecting you’ll ever see.
Score:
- Andrew Kotwicki