The Walker (2007)

Yesterday I saw The Walker, the new film written and directed by Paul Schrader which has opened in London this weekend. I've been a fan of Schrader's work ever since I saw American Gigolo for the second time, so naturally I was looking forward to The Walker. I was also tentatively intrigued by the fact that its synopsis made it sound like a retread of old Schrader territory - specifically, Gigolo itself.

The story centres around Carter Page III (Woody Harrelson), a 'walker' - a man who accompanies rich women to social functions. Being gay, he feels he never has to worry about becoming emotionally entangled with them, and so, when we meet him, he is sitting round a table playing cards, and exchanging louche gossip, with a handful of Washington D.C.'s finest 'ladies'. But when a woman with whom he is especially friendly, Lynn Lockner (Kristin Scott Thomas), discovers the slain body of her lover, Carter steps in to shield her from involvement, and thus becomes the prime suspect himself.

The character of Carter is, of course, redolent of upmarket LA rent boy Julian Kay, whom Richard Gere played so vividly in Gigolo, and the ensuing investigation into Carter's culpability, led by a sympathetic detective (Geff Francis) and an unsympathetic slimeball DA (William Hope), does indeed have echoes of Julian's involvement in the nasty death of one of his clients. For the first half hour of The Walker, I was wondering if Schrader didn't actually intend this new movie as an official remake of his earlier hit, so close are the narrative manoeuvres, the moral imperatives, and the preoccupations with the plastic glamour of the protagonists' worlds. But The Walker never feels like a rehash. One of the main reasons for this is the weirdly compelling performance by Harrelson, who, with a deliberately camp Southern drawl, is initially so clichéd a gay character that we figure there must be more to him than his claim that that 'I'm not naïve - I'm superficial'.

And, indeed, there is. For this superficial, ageing pinup puts his way of life on the line to shelter a dear friend from the prying eyes of the world's press, and the world's lawyers. There's also a potentially touching focus on Carter's more illustrious father and grandfather, who were giant businessmen in their day, and who have left Carter with a dizzy sense of inferiority that his homosexuality only reinforces. Harrelson's performance is abstract in the way it instantly nails a type and then lets the story reveal layers that we wouldn't have guessed at when we first met him. It's courageous, and perhaps foolish, to hang a whole movie on a performance like this, but I feel that The Walker survives it. And this is due largely to the film's style. Shot in 'Scope by cinematographer Chris Seager, The Walker has a clean, pin-sharp, brightly lit texture and a limpid mise en scène that can calm and absorb the more patient (or jaded) cinemagoer.

If there is one clear flaw, it's the rather sealed-off atmosphere: Washington's higher echelons seem to be represented by a handful of famous faces (a rather unconvincing Lauren Bacall, and the welcome, but underused, Lily Tomlin and Ned Beatty) and a few choice interiors. In this regard it brought to mind Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, another film which has little use (or energy) for visualizing the wider world. To add to this, we're never quite sure as to why Carter does risk so much; he claims not to be naïve but he's mature enough (in years and presumably in experience) to know the tenuous hold he actually has on the society he moves in. A fuller sense of what this society really would do to him if he betrayed it would have conveyed the hero's moral choices more robustly to the viewer.

And yet the film's tight focus adds to its dreamy, finely-tuned sense of itself, and demonstrates a craft both more easygoing and more exacting than that encountered in your standard cinematic scattershot aesthetics. Once again, Schrader as a writer-director deserves to be better-known than he is. The Walker, like its central character, is deceptively subtle and surprisingly satisfying. Already I'm looking forward to seeing it again.