Read between the lines

As the opening credits remind us, a factotum is “a man who performs many jobs.” It’s an amusingly ironic title for this film—and for the Charles Bukowski novel on which it is based.

This is, after all, a story about Bukowski’s longtime alter ego Hank Chinaski, a hard-drinking writer whose motley string of short-lived dead-end day jobs represents little more than a series of momentary detours in a life given over to literature, booze and sex.

Chinaski is neither a conventional factotum nor an enterprising jack-of-all-trades, but rather an almost inexplicably durable survivor whose relentless and ruthless devotion to writing, and to skid-row debauchery, matter-of-factly underlines his deep-seated alienation from all the proprieties of middle-class society.

The roguish authority of Matt Dillon’s deadpan performance in the lead role here has much to do with the quietly sustained fascination the production finds in Chinaski’s pointedly erratic ups and downs. Scripted by producer Jim Stark and director Bent Hamer, the film takes the form of a kind of low-life picaresque, an almost aimless string of episodes in which Chinaski drifts through a series of dreary menial jobs while also wandering into and out of assorted barroom romances, drinking binges and extended bouts of literary labor.

A horse-track scam with fellow worker Wally (Fisher Stevens) and a circuitous affair with a wealthy gent’s part-time mistress (Marisa Tomei) form two of the more distinctive episodes in Chinaski’s tragicomic carousings. But the closest the roistering writer comes to a lasting relationship is in an on-again, off-again coupling with Jan (Lili Taylor), another highly sexed boozer.

Taylor’s tough, unsentimental performance pungently matches up with Dillon’s in the film’s low-key mixture of grubby realism and understated pathos. Tomei, excellent in a crucial smaller role, makes an especially sharp contribution to the Bukowskian mood of roistering disillusionment.

Hamer and Stark present all this in more or less unadorned fashion, while also layering it with several enrichening aspects—Dillon’s plain-spoken voice-over renderings of Chinaski’s literary musings, John Christian Rosenlund’s moody and modestly stylized color cinematography, and Kristin Asbjornsen’s jazzy, deceptively frisky music track.