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 S. 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...
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...
- 9/6/2023
- by Budd Wilkins
- Slant Magazine
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