Rewatched Paul Schrader's darkly comic crime film from last year. Holds up well. Its a disturbing omen on the political/economic/identity issues that have made 2017 so bleak and divided. Yet its also more brutal and honest than this first post-Trump year.
Schrader shows the growing depravity, hopelessness and blind evil bubbling up from society
s most privileged outcasts - American white blue collar thugs. He finds them absurd and a bit amusing as well as their ignorant bigotry and hatred. This is an updated, more satirical version of Schrader's Taxi Driver, focused on social factors that produce this particularly toxic and media-protected/media-enabled type of malcontented misfit. The politically correct might mistake Schrader as being sympathetic to the alt-right or amorality when really he is curious to the human condition and finds these despicable characters as intrinsic to solving today's problems because they are the sickest victims.
Nicholas Cage is quite sharp as the lead thug, calling on 100s of his seedier, more conflicted anti-hero roles in the past. The role itself is a kind of dark mirror to his breakout character in Raising Arizona, which is cute. Also Cage is reunited with Willem Dafoe. As in David Lynch's "Wild at Heart", the two are eccentric robbers and like that film Dafoe steals the show as a totally unhinged white trash stereotype of a more realistic color. Christopher Matthew Cook is very well cast and directed as the Curly in their gang of Stooges. Not that he's funny or the focus, but he totally pulls off the illusion that these are not over-the-top parodies but truly insane men you might meet if your life falls apart.
DED works best if you've seen many modern gangster films or at least Schrader's work in the genre, but its a very stylish and intelligent affair. Schrader uses his decent budget, material and technology to make one of his most abstract and surreal films. I feel like there's Godard and maybe even some Refn nods here. The end of the film will definitely lose casual fans but its a clever metaphor for the entire film's theme and ties directly back to Taxi Driver, confirming that Schrader's intention was always that Hollywood endings are very sick, dishonest and self-aggrandizing dreams to insult the intelligence of the audience and that they should deconstruct them to find out what reality holds.
Schrader is proving in his autumn years to be one of the best indie directors we've seen, always sticking to his guns and producing a sharp, critical and entertaining bit of style cinema. And of course Cage and Dafoe have carved out great names without ever having to worry about the budget or exposure of their projects. These are artists who know good art.
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