(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.)
Factotum is as low key as it gets. Subtitled “Man of Many Jobs,” it chronicles the first stage in the rise to fame of Henry Chinaski, the literary alter-ego of Charles Bukowski. Moving erratically (and humorously) from job to job, Chinaski finances his penchant for booze and gambling by a strategic blend of minimum wage paychecks and the affection of loose women who have their own places. Somehow he also manages to crank out a steady stream of short stories, exchanging them in the mail for an endless stream of rejection letters. Much of the film is taken up with his partner-in-crime relationship to the obsessive Jan, one notable interlude being a surreal tryst with the exotically lower-rung Laura and her culterati sugar daddy. Finally, after enduring the particularly banal horror of polishing a giant marble nose at the office of a newspaper he would prefer to be writing for, he gets a story published. The rest is history.
True to the spirit of Bukowski’s more semi-autobiographical novels, Factotum is a stack of tragi-comic vignettes that turn on bits of poignant obscenity concluded by a few brilliant sentences of unpregnant reflection. The strength of Bukowski’s artistry inHam on Rye and Factotum is that he manages to be wide-ranging and sporadic, skipping from town to town, job to job, and bar to bar, yet remains laser focused in terms of voice and theme. He is mumbling and aimless, but seldom loses sight of the miles he wants us to walk with him. The film balances out these features as well as we could expect it to, director Bent Hamer’s (of Kitchen Stories fame) Scandinavian deadpan proving a sensible wallpaper to the persistently drab features of the film.
Chinaski and Jan wrestle something fairly gripping out of the script. It is subtle, but there is an emotional realism and chemistry between them that sort of explains why the whole “Bukowski” thing actually works. My suspicion that this really is a well-done film was confirmed by the appearance of Marisa Tomei as Laura, from whom the director captures an appreciable glimpse of sweetness that isn’t nearly as clichéd as we would expect it to be. Do not be mistaken, there is a lot of cliché in the film. Most of the visual gags and narrative punchlines will strike one as such, but keep in mind that Bukoswki is the one that invented this stuff in the first place. Most drunkenly sardonic, welfare fueled, gutter level black comedy can be traced right back to him. In this sense, the film isn’t a comedy at all. It is an historical epic, the first fledgling steps of what is now a worn-out cultural persona. Whether the film is a gloss on the real Bukowski or not, there is a poetic sensibility here that the Hamer seems Bent (get it?) on drawing out. It is a grimy, unshaven, drunken, cigarette smoking, unemployed, vulgar and lazy sensibility, but there is a spark there nonetheless. BothAmerican Splendor and Crumb seem to be on the tip of Hamer’s tounge.
Compared to Barfly, a much less watchable take on the Bukowski of the same period, Factotum is kid friendly. So there are some obvious ethical issues involved with Hamer’s whitewashing of the traditional Bukowski image, but regardless, Hamer’s Bukowski is the one I prefer to read.