The Walker

Although making a return to the material he explored with American Gigolo (1988) writer/director Paul Schrader isn’t any more successful in integrating the two main strands of murder mystery and character study than he was in the first film. Instead he devotes a disproportionally large amount of the running time to depicting the world of Carter Page III (Woody Harrelson) before resolving the crime e;ement without much effort.

Harrelson does a first-class job in an against-type performance as the eponymous “walker”, Carter Page III, who enjoys his comfortable life as an openly gay interior decorator and unpaid companion of rich, old Washington D.C. society women when they attend various events without their husbands.  He meets weekly with his main circle of “friends” Lynn Lockner (Kristin Scott Thomas), Abigail Delorean (Lily Tomlin) and Natalie Van Miter (Lauren Bacall), at a plush hotel for a game of canasta and a good gossip. After one such session Car gives Lynn a lift to the home of a man with whom she is having an affair. Lynn finds him stabbed to death and Car takes it on himself to help her conceal her involvement in the crime but finds himself as the principal suspect.

As a murder mystery Schrader’s film is hardly enthralling and his script takes the corrupt world of Washington society fixing for granted, dropping a few generic crumbs here and there but never really making much of them. These elements serve rather to provide a backdrop to Car’s story. Although apparently Schrader and Harrelson did not have an easy time of it the latter’s performance is the film’s most engaging aspect. 

 

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