Factotum
With Matt Dillon, Lili Taylor, Didier Flamand, and Marisa Tomei
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Bukowski’s bitter appraisal of blue-collar work and its spiritual suffocation makes Factotum a daunting movie property. Henry Chinaski, his fictional alter ego, travels back and forth from Los Angeles to New Orleans, Philadelphia, Saint Louis, and Miami, working an endless series of crap jobs during and after World War II as he tries to make a name for himself writing short stories. He sorts magazines for a distributor, composes type for a newspaper, posts advertising on subway cars, bakes dog biscuits at a factory, chauffeurs nurses to regional blood drives, shovels coconut shavings onto baked goods, and unloads trucks for a luxury hotel. He works shipping and inventory at a ladies’ dress-wear shop, a bicycle warehouse, an art-supply store, a Christmas decorations wholesaler, and various light-fixture and auto-parts companies. Sometimes he quits. More often he’s fired for slacking off, showing up late, or drinking on the job. None of the jobs means more to him than a cold exchange of his time for a paycheck, and by the end of the novel he’s reduced to day-labor gigs from a skid-row agency.
Like most of Bukowski’s writing, Factotum is thinly veiled autobiography, and much of the action outside the workplace involves his relationship with Jane Cooney Baker, a fellow alcoholic 11 years his senior with whom he lived for several years. His first true love, Baker turns up repeatedly in Bukowski’s work, and she served as the basis for Faye Dunaway’s character in Barfly (1987), the raucous comedy he scripted for director Barbet Schroeder. In Factotum the movie Baker is renamed Jan and played by Lili Taylor, who doesn’t register as much of a personality but makes a more convincing boozehound than the elegant Dunaway. Cutting and pasting episodes from the novel, Hamer nicely dramatizes Chinaski’s bleary relationship with Jan as they meet, separate, reunite, and part again for good. In one of the best scenes–created for the movie but deftly reproducing Bukowski’s brand of black humor–they wake up in each other’s arms, then each goes to the toilet to vomit. Their love for each other is genuine, but a gallon of red wine doesn’t hurt.
