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OTHER REVIEWS: Bringing Out the Dead The Piano Teacher Secretary The Rules of Attraction |
Auto Focus  BY: DAVID PERRY Quite possibly the most depressing website out there is BobCrane.com, a thoroughly wretched hole-in-the-wall site that professes to be the Mecca for information on Bob Crane, the star of the television comedy Hogan's Heroes. At first glance, this site is not so disparaging (other than the opening disclaimer which acts like visitors are entering a porn site) until a little perusal finds the real tawdry insides of Bob Crane and what the site uses as its main draw. BobCrane.com, you see, is run by Bob Crane's second son Scotty. One would expect that such a owner and operator would pain to ensure that his father would be seen in a light fitting for a pater familias. Not so: Bob Crane's much-gossiped obsession with filming his own promiscuous sexual liaisons is the real show, not the life of some forgotten 1960s television star. The first link is to a section simply titled "XXX," an area littered with pictures of Bob Crane mid-coitus (just clicks away from a page showing pictures of Bob Crane and family happily posing with Mickey Mouse). None of the sleazy images are shown in this part of the site -- access to that area costs $3.95 for three days. After seeing Auto Focus, Paul Schrader's attempt to bring Bob Crane's sex addiction to the screen, the reasoning behind Crane's fetishistic filming of his own sex life seems less illusory. Bob Crane was a man who saw his ability to get laid every night as proof of his worth. If not for the women he slept with every night, he was not the Bob Crane, dashing and debonair ladies man, he thought he was. The film follows Crane (Kinnear) from his early, lowly career work as a disc jockey trying his best to bring his casual style to the masses. His chance to do such came in the form of Hogan's Heroes, the show best known for its attempt to make comedy out of Nazi POW camps. It was a role that subsequently made him a household name as the show went to the top of the ratings -- it's the type of sudden celebrity story that must have a downfall coming. His first wife (Wilson) leaves him over his predilection for porn in their ultra- conservative Catholic home. Even then, Crane had already found a love for the smutty moving image, preferring, of course, that he be the star of said smut. Video taping himself having sex with strangers became his own drug, an addiction that literally destroyed his life and his career: after a popular show came a series of failed movies, a failed dinner theater show, and two failed marriages. Things would not have been so bad for Bob Crane had Richard Dawson (Rodgers), his famously lothario costar on Hogan's Heroes, not introduced Crane to John Carpenter (Dafoe), a cut-rate Sony dealer who gave products to stars in hopes of increasing consumer interest in them. It was Carpenter who first presented Crane with the means to fulfill his obsessive sexual lifestyle. They would prepare orgies in Carpenter's bachelor pad and then spend the next day masturbating to their taped work. There are, of course, homosexual undertones to any relationship like this -- an impression that Crane is more than unwilling to accept. The film attempts to come up with some reasoning behind Crane's murder in 1978 by pontificating on the grandiose sexuality and possibly homicidal interests of a scorned lover, even if that means that the film ends rather slanderously. At the heart of the movie is Greg Kinnear's incredible performance. He takes an intensely complex man and attempts to uncover him, layer by layer, to the audience. There is, of course, a double meaning to Kinnear's unraveling, which takes place quite purposefully as his own inner demons come out of their church-affected drawing rooms. Crane, to the very end, attempted to convince people that his affliction was normal, a posit that Kinnear relishes imparting: with a crumpled man sitting at a bar circa. 1975 and watching women approach him simply because he had the barkeep turn on Hogan's Heroes, the audience can only feel some sympathy for the smarmy schlep. Taking the story of Bob Crane is not a terrible surprise from Paul Schrader, whose films of male insecurity and ineffectiveness in society are always interesting (even if other flaws ultimately destroy the film, as was the case with American Gigolo). Though best known for penning some of Martin Scorsese's masterpieces (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Bringing Out the Dead), Schrader has proven to be as equally formidable director as writer. His 1997 masterpiece Affliction is still one of the best realizations of the male self-destructiveness that can destroy families across generations. Bob Crane is not unlike the people that filled Schrader's
second work as a director on 1979's Hardcore. In that film, George C. Scott made
his way through the world of porn production to save his porn actress daughter. That is
the same task Paul Schrader has given to himself in working on Auto Focus. He
seems to be tempting, wishing he could do something to save his wayward subject before he
is destroyed. Schrader is reminding the audience of what Bob Crane did in the name of
sexual pleasure during his life, but he is also attempting to let us understand the
dynamics that could have led him to such a lifestyle. It's sad: Paul Schrader, who never
met Bob Crane, is doing him a service by explaining the Crane psyche, while Crane's own
son is hocking his dad's homemade porn on broadband. |
