Review: Paul Schrader’s Neo-Noir Thriller ‘Hardcore’ from KL Studio Classics Blu-ray

Paul Schrader’s Hardcore is one of the writer-director’s most unabashedly autobiographical films. The opening montage of winter in Grand Rapids, Michigan, contains shots of the street where he grew up, his family members, and places he worked. Schrader has also mentioned in interviews that George C. Scott’s Calvinist furniture manufacturer, Jake Van Dorn, is an equivocal portrait of his father.

That entire sequence is shot through with ambivalence. The Van Dorn clan is depicted with warmth and hominess, but there are cracks evident in the facade: the disapproving comments about modern media; the passive-aggressive way in which the emotionally distant Jake talks down to a female employee; and the absence of a presiding maternal figure.

When his daughter, Kristen (Ilah Davis), inexplicably goes missing on a church trip to California, Jake is determined to track her down with the help of Andy Mast (Peter Boyle), a morally questionable private detective who plays Virgil to Jake’s Dante during his descent into the underworld of what Jake’s Calvinist beliefs would term “total depravity.” Along the way, Jake takes up with sex worker Niki (Season Hubley) as an informant. But, really, she’s there as a sounding board off whom Schrader can bounce notions of sex and spirituality. This gets a bit on the nose at times, but often Niki serves to puncture Jake’s tendency to proselytize, as when he delivers the “TULIP” speech espousing core Calvinist ideas. Later, Niki desultorily quips, “At least you get to go to heaven. I don’t get shit.”

Throughout Hardcore, Schrader also treats the world of pornography—namely the sex shops, bookstores, and skin-flick joints concentrated in the “combat zones” of L.A., San Diego, and San Francisco—with a certain measure of equivocation. You get the sense that he’s making up for opportunities denied him by his strict upbringing, wallowing in the paraphernalia of perversion while, at the same time, portraying the scene as the abode of hopelessly damaged lost souls. Schrader also can’t seem to help straying into the realm of the urban myth when he uses the apocryphal existence of the snuff film to represent the lowest circle of this particular inferno.

As with Schrader’s script for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, the narrative structure of Hardcore closely resembles John Ford’s The Searchers, with Scott as John Wayne and Davis as Natalie Wood. The film’s final scene intriguingly tries to graft the unalloyed pessimism of Chinatown’s ending onto the far more pat resolution here, even if we do get a lovely swooping crane shot of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. According to Schrader’s commentary track for the film, the finale emulating The Searchers was forced on him by the studio. In his original draft, Jake discovers that Kristen died in a car crash unrelated to pornography, and now he must reconcile himself with the irresolution of his search. It would’ve been a much stronger ending, akin to Taxi Driver’s concluding vision of the madman as cultural hero.

Image/Sound

The excellent 1080p transfer of Hardcore does justice to the twofold visual scheme worked out by Paul Schrader and cinematographer Michael Chapman. The prosaic world of Grands Rapids is characterized by muted whites and earth tones, while the seedy porn demimonde is dominated by boldly vibrant gel lighting, all hots reds and sickly greens, which really pops in this transfer. Grain is prevalent, occasionally thick, but always well-maintained. Audio comes in a sold Master Audio two-channel mono mix that cleanly carries the dialogue and gives due weight to the multifaceted score by Jack Nitzsche, whose atypical instrumentation ranges from moody synths and ominous church organs to wailing electric guitars.

Extras

Kino carries over the two audio commentaries from Twilight Time’s out-of-print Blu-ray from 2016. In the first, Schrader revisits Hardcore for the first time in decades, and he’s hard on the film, pointing out a number of aspects he now finds objectionable, including the dearth of camera movement. He also goes into Hardcore’s autobiographical elements, original casting choices, and studio-mandated changes to the ending. The second track lets film historians Eddy Friedfeld, Lee Pfeiffer, and Paul Scrabo make an argument for the merits of the film. Along the way, they delve into its connections to other Schrader projects, the state of studio filmmaking in the late ’70s, and cultural attitudes toward pornography.

Overall

Kino’s release of Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, the chronicle of one man’s harrowing descent into a netherworld of total depravity, includes a sturdy transfer and two excellent commentary tracks.