Set in Washington D.C., The Walker follows Carter Page (Woody Harrelson), a popular socialite who serves as a confidant, companion, and card partner to the wives of the most powerful men in America.  When Carter’s dearest friend (Kristen Scott Thomas) finds herself on the brink of scandal, he covers for her.  Suddenly, he finds himself the chief suspect in a criminal investigation, and this well connected man-about-town becomes an outcast, hounded by the police and forced to hunt down the true culprit in order to clear his name.

Critique

Paul Schrader is one of those guys I wonder about every now and then, what’s he’s working, when and if he’ll ever make another film.  He doesn’t get as much play as his contemporaries, the other guys he came out of the 70’s with, but his voice is a necessary one.

It’s nice to see The Walker come out at all.  These days, it seems like a miracle anytime a movie gets made that’s not a remake or an adaptation of some video game, but it’s especially nice because this is the best film Schrader has made in probably a decade.  The last thing he did was the prequel to The Exorcist, which unfortunately became the other prequel after his version was completely rewritten, recast and reshot.  Before that we got Autofocus, the Bob Crane biopic.  I like the film a lot, but it was a little too E! True Hollywood Story to be truly great.

The Walker is the first film of Schrader’s in some time that feels personal, where you can almost see the thumbprints on the celluloid, smell his cologne on every frame.  Some have said that it’s his best film since Affliction, but it might be his most personal film since Light Sleeper in 1992.

Schrader sums up the central theme of his work in the scene where the police are questioning Carter about the just-deceased Robbie.  “So you were close,” the cop says.  Correcting him, Carter says, “I didn’t say we were close.  I said I had known him for 20 years.”  There is a difference.  Carter is surrounded by people he has known for years, but there is no one he is really close to.

The center of Carter’s world is the weekly game of canasta he plays with the wives of Washington’s powerful men.  Carter is one of the girls.  He doesn’t interact with the men, their husbands; he and the wives he entertains are a part of that world while being isolated from it.  We meet these men only in passing.

Schrader does not use words to detail this isolation – the characters don’t lament over it – he shows it to us, something more and more filmmakers seem less and less capable of doing.  The way shots are set up, the way Schrader films his subjects tells us everything.  The two main rooms in the film – Carter’s apartment and the parlor where he plays cards – are like cages, birdcages, where these pets entertain themselves.  Many shots are made up of empty space, the person in the shot relegated to the far edge of the frame, the outskirts, taking up the same part of the photograph that they would in their lives.

When Carter finds Robbie dead, it is like finding a bird at the bottom of its cage, and Carter looks down on him as though he were looking down on himself.  The only thing that stops him from walking away from the scene altogether is being seen by one of Robbie’s neighbors.  Coming and going would be harder to explain that discovering the body, but Carter gets in trouble nonetheless.

Carter is every bit the meticulous dresser as Julian, Richard Gere’s character in American Gigolo, the film of Schrader’s closest to The Walker.  Every suit, every tie, every crease sets Carter apart.  Even at the day job he works one day a week, Carter looks too immaculate to be working in an office.  When his partner, Emek, asks him is he is wearing a new suit, Carter replies, tongue-in-cheekly, “What, this old thing?”  It’s a cliché and he knows it, but he also loves to be asked.

Emek is Carter’s only real friend.  His relationship with Emek is the only one with any honesty to it, and it is the only one in which Carter never seems comfortable.  He does not even seem capable of admitting that they are in a relationship.  It is a normal relationship, the two of them are not using each other as examples of what society they belong to, and Carter does not know how to behave.  “It’s ridiculous,” he says, “we’re ridiculous.”  This is exactly the thing we might say about his other relationships.  Interestingly, the times he is with Emek are the only times we see Carter casually dressed.  He hangs up the suits for a pair of jeans. 

Woody Harrelson plays Carter as a world weary, charismatic man who has seen it all and seen it all.  He plays Carter as a man who has been around so long he is tired by all of it, through all the quips and all the card games, he is spent.  His voice is that of a refined southern gentleman, but there is something else, a slight slur like one might have after being out all night.  We get the sense that Carter has been out all night for 30 years.

In the end, Carter is involuntarily set free, released by his so-called friends after drawing the stink of scandal a little too close to the card game.  Carter and his friends all love a good scandal, as long as their not part of it, and he broke some of his world’s cardinal rules, even as he was being abandoned.  He knows this early on, as Abigail (Lily Tomlin) makes up an obvious excuse for not being able to talk.  “That’s the sound of doors closing,” he tells his cat.  As he is driven to his trial, his lawyer tells him, “It’s a little like a society opening,” only now it is Carter who is being walked, and when he returns to the card game to give Lynn a sensitive photo, they all glare at him.  He is not part of the game anymore, he’s just an annoying man interrupting their play.  They tell him to leave by asking him to stay.  It is as though they are seeing each other for the first time.
 

Video

The Walker is presented in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio.  The transfer on this disc is exceptional.  The film’s color palate is expertly translated; the black and white levels and the whole color spectrum are perfectly balanced.  The overall picture is sharp.

Audio 

This disc is presented in 5.1 Surround.  This is not an overly complicated soundtrack, but the presentation is sharp.  The best example of this is Carter’s foot chase towards the end of the film.  The clop-echo of every hurried footstep is rendered perfectly.  The levels are sharp and well balanced and the overall presentation is crisp.
 

Special Features

The Making of The Walker: this is a short, quick behind-the-scenes look at the film.  I wish I could say more, but this looks like something that was intended to run between movies on HBO. 

Theatrical Trailer: the original.

If there is an area where this disc fails, this is it.  We get a total of maybe five minutes of bonus material, off of it run-of-the-mill.
 

Final Thoughts

The Walker is a great film, certainly Schrader’s best in some time.  The performances all around, Harrelson’s in particular, are excellent.  The film was an overlooked highlight of 2007, and its presentation on DVD is excellent.  The bonus material is lacking, but this is still a disc to look for.