The Walker

The Walker

Directed by Paul Schrader (R)

A professional escort gets mixed up in a Washington murder scandal.

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Not quite the director’s best but hardly his worst, The Walker is indelibly a Paul Schrader film, said Leslie Felperin in Variety. From Taxi Driver, which he wrote for Martin Scorsese, to his own Auto Focus, the writer-director has specialized in character studies of people who feel trapped in a disturbed, apathetic society. The subject here is Carter Page III (Woody Harrelson), a well-to-do gay man who works as a professional “walker,” squiring the wives of Washington’s political elite on their many social appointments. These women (Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin, and Kristin Scott Thomas) “stage-manage their husbands’ careers” and have made Carter their “court jester.” So Carter ends up taking the rap when one gets mixed up in murder. The Walker completes Schrader’s “lonely man” trilogy, which includes American Gigolo and Light Sleeper. The new one pays homage to those films but lacks the “ambitious innovation, emotional ferocity, and spiritual top notes” of his best work. The Walker could generously be categorized as a “work in progress,” said Rex Reed in The New York Observer. But Harrelson is badly miscast. He “minces his way through a Truman Capote impersonation” and comes off like “Willie Nelson playing Louis XIV.” Schrader has no one to blame but himself for Harrelson’s embarrassing performance, said Jack Mathews in the New York Daily News. Had the director asked him to “drop the SNL caricature,” he might have saved his film.