He made De Niro a
taxi driver, Gere an American gigolo, and with his
latest film, The Walker, writer-director Paul
Schrader refashions Woody Harrelson as a gay D.C.
socialite.
Imagine a
middle-aged man with this unlikely résumé: In his
20s he was a taxi driver; in his 30s, a high-priced
male prostitute; and in his 40s, an insomniac drug
dealer. As the man enters his 50s, where would an
employment agency hope to slot him?
Paul Schrader
pondered that question several years ago. As the writer of
Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, and Light
Sleeper, Schrader has led that man -- a lonely
fringe character with unusual wares to ply -- through a
series of films he sees as thematically linked.
“I was
thinking of Julian Kaye from American Gigolo
and I started wondering what would become of a person like
that in midlife,” Schrader explains.
“He’d be funny, because his skills would
be more social, and he’d probably be out of the
closet. He’d be like a society walker, which
struck me as an interesting occupational metaphor for
these kinds of service industries -- like a taxi driver, a
drug dealer, or a gigolo -- that look into society but
aren’t really quite part of it.”
The result is
Carter Page III, a gay Washington, D.C., gadfly portrayed
by Woody Harrelson. Bristling under the weight of his
family’s political legacy, Carter turns into a
Capote-like confidant to a gaggle of society wives
(including Lily Tomlin and Lauren Bacall). When one of those
wives, played by Kristin Scott Thomas, becomes
embroiled in a murder plot, Carter’s attempts
to help her draw him deeper into the cross fire, where
he discovers inner strength he didn’t know he had.
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