Hardcore is both screed and confession, a takedown from writer-director Paul Schrader that is aimed at his religious upbringing and, in its more interesting moments, himself.
The irony is thick in the opening section, a series of wintry, Rockwellian vignettes set to the sweetly sincere sound of Susan Raye’s “Precious Memories” (“Precious father, loving mother / Fly across the lonely years / And old home scenes of my childhood / In fond memories appear”). After a few more sequences establishing the quaint, cloistered, Dutch Calvinist traditions of Schrader’s West Michigan youth—the multigenerational family dinners after church on Sunday, the stern theological debates among the men, the carefully shoveled walkways through the snow, so that no one steps off their predestined path—the movie starts really turning the screws. A phone call interrupts one of those dinners, informing rigid, repressed furniture-maker Jake Van Dorn (George C. Scott) that his teen daughter Kristen (Ilah Davis) has disappeared while on a youth-group trip to California. When a private detective (Peter Boyle) comes across an amateur porn film in which Kristen appears to be a willing participant, a devastated Van Dorn flies to Babylon to retrieve his girl.
What keeps Hardcore from being cheap or exploitative is the way Van Dorn imperceptibly comes to stand in not only for the stringent men of Schrader’s father’s generation, but also for Schrader the prodigal son—the one who went West to write movies like Taxi Driver and write and direct something like Hardcore. As Van Dorn becomes more embroiled in the porn industry while searching for Kristen, distorted organ variations on familiar hymns haunt the soundtrack. Michael Chapman’s gorgeously lurid cinematography, meanwhile, turns sex-shop signs into emblems of beauty. Nothing we experience—neither the increasingly abusive porn scene nor Van Dorn’s stalwart religious beliefs—make any sense, independently or certainly when held together.
Chapman is just one of the obvious elements taken from Taxi Driver; much of Hardcore feels like Schrader ripping off himself. Of course it pales in comparison to that Martin Scorsese-directed picture, particularly in its almost complete lack of interest in the psychology and experience of Davis’ Kristen (Jodie Foster’s Iris receives far more concern in Taxi Driver). This is why Hardcore’s weakest moments are its final ones, which bring together father and daughter for an awkward, unconvincing resolution.
And yet there’s still something powerful and personal at work here. I can say from experience that the tradition Schrader grew up within deserves critique for its emphasis on obedience over grace. That’s a given, bluntly argued here. But the movie also suggests, almost in spite of itself, that jettisoning faith altogether isn’t an honest option. Is there something that speaks, authentically, to both of Hardcore’s wildly different worlds? It’s a question Schrader would spend the rest of his career exploring.
(3/23/2023)
