It’s a casting conundrum. Few would argue that Matt Dillon corresponds more closely to their idea of Charles Bukowski than Mickey Rourke. It may be that Matt’s on a respectable roll right now – Crash, City of Ghosts – and we wish him all the best in seeking out roles more suited to his talents than There’s Something About Mary, charming though that was. But could the man formerly known as Mr. Wonderful really do the gutteral belly crawl required to essay Henry Chinaski – Bukowski’s alter ego?
Well yes, largely because Bent Hamer’s film totally, completely nails the writer in a way that previous attempts – Barfly (with Mickey Rourke‘s rendition) and Crazy Love – did not. Based on the novel of the same name, but incorporating material from three further short stories, Factotum recounts Chinaski’s alcohol addiction, his loose women and his chequered employment history. Drifting through bike shops and pickle factories and statue cleaning gigs and bars and bedrooms and days at the track, Chinaski starts as he means to go on – in a drunken stupor with a woman of ill-repute.
Hamer somehow fashions something coherent and amusing from the material while everyone involved hits the right comic-horror notes. Lili Taylor as Chinaski’s on-off lover is characteristically brilliant but the real surprise is Dillon. Extraordinary as it sounds, he’s a better Chinaski/Bukowski than Mickey Rourke. He’s a bit too unsullied looking and unlike Rourke, his face hasn’t gnarled into a travelogue of horrors witnessed and survived. But Dillon has all the right moves nonetheless. He gets Bukowski’s too human comedy and deftly conveys that sense of a writer bum is something to be, if only because the alternative is regular bum. Quite.