Another man, another room, another vile past deed in need of expiation. On the one hand you could accuse writer-director Paul Schrader of retreading old ground with his latest unadorned exploration of guilt, transgression and the intellectual work that a sinner must do in order to seek redemption for his sins. On the other hand, you cannot ever accuse Paul Schrader of taking the easy way out when there is available to him a difficult way to get deeper in.
If Schrader here is embracing familiar themes, there is nothing comfortable about this embrace, given that those themes, present in the majority of his recent output, can be reduced to the same question, reformulated each time to a different, and differently heinous, model. In “The Card Counter,” he wondered if it is possible to once have been, but no longer be, a torturer. In “Master Gardener,” he pondered whether one could once have been, but no longer be, a Nazi. And with this new film, his endless preoccupations approach once again a kind of moral event-horizon of awfulness: Is it possible to once have been a pedophile?
The opening of “The Basics of Philosophy” puts Jack Huston‘s Prof. John Jorrisen in front of a blackboard on which is written “The Basics of Philosophy,” as he talks to his students about his course, “The Basics of Philosophy,” while trying to elicit from them their own impressions of, well, the basics of philosophy. This bluntly presentational approach is either damningly clumsy, or daringly straightforward, depending on which side of the Schrader Dividing Line you fall. And wherever you have landed in the past, this film — what was it called again? — is unlikely to be the one that will shift you from one column to the other.
But for those who find (and in some cases may be slightly mystified as to why) that there is a nagging, needling value to Schrader’s ongoing project of tussling with grandiose dilemmas of transgression and deliverance, there is some new news here. For one thing, Schrader’s collaboration with ace DP Sean Price Williams lends bit more visual interest to the ascetic, bordering on bland, aesthetic he has established before. And for another, the seriousness of Schrader’s intentions, however uneven the outcome, are flattered by the somber mood established by Eli Kezsler’s restless, haunted score.
Still, an air of artificiality and sometimes theatricality does pervade his talky, often didactic scenes, which actually plays to the benefit of the performances — especially from Huston. He is impressive here because of the peculiar intensity of his gaze, the too-smoothly-controlled, cultured timbre of his voice, the general sense of something about him being just that bit off.
John teaches at a small, leafy college by day, while by night working on a book about rationalist philosopher Spinoza and dating his beautiful colleague Becca (Sofia Boutella), a professor of psychology who has a son with whom John gets along well. John’s father Melvyn (Bill Pullman), a wealthy captain-of-industry-type whose relationship with his son has been under some unnamed strain for a long time, is in hospital, dying. At his funeral, John delivers a eulogy with a terseness he claims is in tribute to his father’s love of precision and economy of language.
But as he stumbles over the plain words, he spots Miguel Vasque (an excellent Daniel Zovatto) sitting in one of the pews. As relayed through flashbacks more suggestive than graphic and that employ the rather cheaply televisual trick of being rendered in high-contrast black and white to blast out the age lines on the actors’ faces, many years before, John had been giving piano lessons to 14-year-old Miguel (Trevor Dolden), the son of the family’s gardener. At one of those sessions, John sexually abused the boy, then immediately confessed as much to his father, who undertook, essentially, a lifetime of financial and emotional support for Miguel and his family in order to atone for — and also to cover up — his son’s crime.
John seeks out a confrontation with Miguel, now a successful realtor. It seems like the story will plot a direct course as a perpetrator seeks forgiveness from his victim — even allowing for a frankly bizarre interlude where John strolls through a park chatting with an unconvincingly bewigged Spinoza (Karl Glusman), in perhaps this staggeringly serious drama’s only attempt at levity. But his past with Miguel – who is always a threatening and slightly sinister presence for John, but is also pretty much the only character who acts with decency and without deceit throughout — is only one aspect of an increasingly knotted-up narrative. The film soon takes on the strangely idiosyncratic shape of Schrader’s own intellectual obsessions, encompassing thwarted desire, suicide, self-delusion, self-examination and sins of the kind that permanently stain the soul, rather than proceeding with anything approaching psychological plausibility.
John believes his rape of a child was a one-off, and he will never commit such an act again. John believes he is sorry. John believes he is not gay. John believes a lot of stuff, but behaves in ways that destabilize all those beliefs, that feel like Schrader arguing the points out in a way that compels even, and sometimes especially, when it fails to convince.
Like in the rest of his “Man in a Room” movies, with “The Basics of Philosophy,” Schrader betrays a self-aware intellectual and ethical vulnerability that is sincere and conflicted and hard to reconcile with the public Paul Schrader of the often indefensibly unreconstructed social media presence. But perhaps we should stop being surprised at these contradictions. As the ambivalent conclusion of “The Basics of Philosophy” suggests, yes, it is possible for a man to change. But as soon as you admit that truth, you must also admit the ever-present, looming possibility of him changing back.
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