When my friend Marty was hit by a car five years ago, no doubt jaywalking to work, I inherited his records, his garage-sale effluvia, and best of all, his collection of Charles Bukowski novels. With his freezer full of pot brownies, his sex life unfolding at the windmill by Ocean Beach, and at least 13 years of his adult working life given over to skimming by on SSI checks supplemented by an occasional rock column, Marty did his level best to be a homosexual version of America's skid-row poet. Factotum, the gloriously foul, morose comedy based on Bukowski's second published novel, could be a dress rehearsal for an accurate and gritty account of mid-century underground queer life, the kind Marty took up with drunken abandon when he joined the Black Cat crowd in North Beach, circa the late 1960s.
The German-born, LA-raised Bukowski never seemed to care much about anything except getting down a daily record of every barstool, shot glass, unfaithful girlfriend, flophouse bed and dead-end job that passed through 74 years of hard living.
I'm no fan of Barfly, the slick, 1987 Hollywood version of Bukowski's philosophy starring the manly mess that was Mickey Rourke. Despite a Bukowski-penned screenplay, Barfly seemed a romanticized spin on a lifestyle that, if it's anything, is resolutely anti-romantic.
Former child star Matt Dillon might seem an odd choice to be Bukowski's alter ego Henry Chinaski, but in some ways this is the role he was destined to play. Even when he was a skinny Tiger Beat pin-up boy, the Mamaroneck, NY-raised Dillon, launched by a providential tryout for the 1979 youth rebel film Over the Edge, never traded strictly on his looks. If he was cursed to be pretty, he would at least be a pretty bad boy and get his nose broken or his looks sullied, as with his teen hoodlum in My Bodyguard. The first rehearsal for Bukowski was Dillon's sassy take on the head of a family of Portland, Oregon lay-abouts, Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy. Dillon's handsome slouch is only happy when he's pulling a heist, baiting the cops or getting high, so much so that he becomes functionally impotent for his mistress-in-crime, the lovely Kelly Lynch.
Two decades later, the now middle-aged Dillon has added manly girth and a dead-on double-take stare-down that would leave both Jack Benny and Charles Bronson gasping in admiration. That stare is invoked whenever Chinaski is called upon to violate his scared manly code: never grovel to the boss, unless it's been a month since your last drink.
Bukowski was not a good-looking man, he probably wasn't even cute in the crib, so it's to Dillon's credit that he inhabits him without doing a Charlize Theron-style radical makeover. Besides the beard, all you really notice is a stiff way of carrying himself that comes to comic advantage when Chinaski, dying for a drink, has to literally wrestle his midget supervisor to the floor of the loading dock to get free from a pickle-packing factory job in time to get behind a shotglass.
Sex chat
Factotum benefits from a stellar ensemble including former pretty-boy teen star Fischer Stevens as Chinaski's racetrack buddy. A truism about any macho booze-fest is the obligatory scene when two pals have that little chat that proves to each other that neither is queer. The subject: sexually demanding women.
"They want to fuck four times a day."
"If you drink or gamble, they think it's a put-down of their love."
"Get a woman who likes to drink and gamble."
"Who wants a woman like that!"
To their credit, the filmmakers include a Bukowski zinger that reads badly now but has to be taken in the spirit of very different times. After a blizzard of unaccustomed apartment-cleaning that winds up alienating his girlfriend, the manly guy confesses, "I must be turning into a fag!" Factotum is like an archeological dig into what used to be the cutting edge of hip, until open queers joined the party.
Lili Taylor is absolutely fearless, sans vanity as the loud-mouthed jealous girlfriend Jan, whose sexual appetites Chinaski touts with little tact. "Jan was an excellent fuck. She had a tight pussy. She took it like a knife that was killing her." Written at a time when prizefighters still went 15 rounds, it could be an epitaph for generations of couples whose best times were bedtimes.
Norwegian director Bent Hamer and producer Jim Stark wisely choose not to attempt a 1950s-period reconstruction of the actual LA skid-row haunts that kept Bukowski scribbling furiously. Success overcame him midlife when a short story with beer in the title was accepted by Black Sparrow Press.
Factotum underplays the truism that we all have a little Bukowski in us. A parting shot sums up a lifetime of unsettled scores.
"Amazingly, we hold on to our anger. Decades given over to petty rancor. Finally there is nothing for death to take away."