by When you think about a man trapped in New York City so alienated from society he can either lock himself in and retreat to his personal world or turn violent you’re inevitably ending up thinking about Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. It was the film that set the tone for not only Scorsese’s prolific career making some of the finest movies but also for Robert DeNiro’s rise to stardom. The man who wrote the script is Paul Schrader, probably one of the most underrated and at the same time least appreciated filmmakers. Schrader wrote Taxi Driver in a time of personal crisis and he funneled his anxieties and ideas on misguided social criticism into Travis Bickle, a larger-than-life anti-hero who is probably more famous than the film that made him famous. The success of Taxi Driver boosted Schrader’s career and he went on to make some great movies. Several are his so-called “man in his room” stories: American Gigolo (1980), Light Sleeper (1992), The Walker (2007) and The Canyons (2013). These films depict an “American” man in his twenties, thirties, forties and fifties, with The Canyons being an exception to the pattern, and arguable not a part of the canon at all, and how his facade of superficiality and lack of actual character is destroyed by devastating events. There are reoccurring patterns in these films but every single one (again, arguably except for The Canyons) is a masterpiece of visual storytelling. What these men have in common is that they either turn toward violence or find themselves surrounded and trapped by violence. But what if they decided to lock themselves in, to break this vicious circle by willingly retreating to their own worlds? So far, Paul Schrader hasn’t given an answer to this question. Gus Van Sant has.
Finding Forrester is a wonderful film. It is so good it could’ve been a Schrader script, had he decided to write on his “man in his room” in his seventies, after he deliberately chose exile in a small time capsule on top of an apartment building in the Bronx, New York City, over violence of whatever kind. During the opening sequence we see several views of the Bronx and several of its inhabitants while listening to a rap song. Now, the Bronx is widely regarded as a “bad” quarter, stricken by poverty, crime and drugs. At the same time, it is home to 1.5 million people. Certainly not all of them are part of the problem and it is remarkable how Gus Van Sant manages to make the mundane, the projects, the ghetto, look beautiful. We see huge apartment towers, streets lined by buildings like walls, and still it retains a beauty of its own that is almost magical. It reminds us that not everyone lives on the Upper West Side and that not everyone should, since there is beauty everywhere as much as there are good people. Whether or not they’re struggling to make ends meet doesn’t mean their lives are not worth living or that they’re living in purgatory.
Jamal Wallace is an anachronism to the world he was born into. Even though he’s an apt basketball player he reads literature and writes poetry when nobody is watching. In the Bronx the only means of upward mobility is sports and the most accessible sports is basketball. So he and his friends play on one of the public courts, right underneath “the window,” the mysterious top-floor apartment whose tenant nobody has ever seen. Being boys, they play chicken and Jamal agrees to climb up the fire escape, enter the apartment and steal something. What happens then can only be described as serendipity. Jamal is surprised by the mysterious tenant and escapes but loses his backpack, including the notebooks filled with his writing. He gets it back – filled with corrections written in red pen. It is curiosity that lures Jamal back to the apartment, on top of a building that is detached but apparently used to be part of a block of older buildings that have been demolished over the years, expressing a gradual process of change and, arguably decay, that has taken place in the Bronx. The man he finds was supposedly lost years ago, too: William Forrester.
Played by a marvelous Sean Connery, William Forrester is the epitome of the reclusive, eccentric author who is sick of the world. And maybe the world has become sick over time. Jamal and William become friends and the writer teaches the novice how to refine his writing. There is no barrier of racism or age between them. Forrester gradually opens up to his new friend and tells him stories of a time long past. A time when everything was alright and the New York Yankees were habitually making the playoffs and people indulged in baseball in late fall. Everything seems prettier in retrospect, though Jamal later learns that William retreated to his apartment not only because he disagreed with how his praised debut novel Avalon Landing has been interpreted by critics and readers alike. He feels bereft of what was his, judged by people who could never achieve anything of the kind themselves – and his reaction is to keep on writing, though exclusively for himself. This is the most violent act, next to social clumsiness that is inevitable after decades of limited human contact, that William is capable of. A constant stream of readers enables him to live off his royalties but instead of interact and communicate with them he writes books they will never be able to read, regardless of how much they’re longing for it. Personal crisis made William Forrester who he is. Losing his entire family after the war and having to bury them leaves scars on him, particularly the loss of his brother after he survived World War II. This is conceivable, though it seems it is not only critics and the loss of his family, by the way something that he and Jamal have in common, if in different ways, that turned him into the reclusive author.
When William tells Jamal how things were in the Bronx during his youth and, apropos of nothing teaches Jamal to write the first draft of everything with his heart instead of the head while effortlessly tapping out a page at the speed of light on his mechanical typewriter, it is easily understandable that he thinks the world is going to pieces and decides not to participate in social life anymore. What Gus Van Sant showed us at the beginning of the film is lost on William. He is so bitter that he can’t see the beauty right in front of him and only observes the people like animals in a zoo. He can’t distinguish the good people from the bad. At least until Jamal becomes his friend. Even though Jamal is a basketball player they share a passion for the New York Yankees, which is also a connection between Jamal and his brother Terrell, played by Busta Rhymes, who works at Yankee Stadium as parking attendant while working on a career as a rapper and gives his brother a ticket for the hottest series of the season, uttering the famous four words that fill every Yankees fan with both excitement and contempt: Boss Tunn Red Sox. Next to literature, sports brings William and Jamal together and William watches Jamal’s basketball games on TV if he can. The TV set is a window to another world that he can’t enter so far, much like the actual window above the basketball court.
But it is not only a passion for sports they have in common. Finding academic success and attending a private school on a full scholarship alienates Jamal from his friends he grew up with. He finds new friends, most notably a guy named Coleridge he defends from his teacher Crawford, a failed writer Forrester dislikes, and Claire, his love interest. Jamal and Claire would fit together if it weren’t for the color of their skin and, consequently, the different worlds that produced them. Jamal is from the Bronx, Claire grew up close to Central Park. It is their love for fiction, particularly Forrester’s Avalon Landing, they share, and Jamal even gives her a signed copy and lies about how he acquired it. But Jamal is unable to shake off his personal history and also unable to acknowledge that barriers can be overcome. That keeps them apart. Jamal is a very self-contained character and it is difficult to actually determine when he decided that neither the Bronx nor Manhattan is his world but there appears to be a turning point in his development that is wonderfully visualized. After a basketball game with his new elite school team Jamal speaks with his old friend Fly who came all the way down from the Bronx to watch. They stand at the gym’s exit and are divided by the spectators filing out the building. All of them are well-dressed, wearing the school’s uniforms, like Jamal. All of them are white, too. Jamal introduces Fly to Claire and she politely shakes hands with him but then asks Jamal to come with her. Fly is left behind and walks back home. It is a poignant scene, defining a character who is torn between making the best of his talents and opportunities and staying true to his friends, family and personal heritage.
Why is it that the words that we write for ourselves are always so much better than the words we write for others?
William Forrester
This is the kind of defining moment that could’ve happened to Travis Bickle as well. But Jamal is different. Instead of destroying others (and himself along the way) he decides to fail on his own terms. An essay he handed in for a writing contest that contains part of Forrester’s writing that was previously published in a magazine gives him trouble with Crawford, who’s seeking revenge for being embarrassed by Jamal in front of his class, and Jamal is then on probation, though given a way out to keep his scholarship. He is told to win the basketball championship for his school to redeem himself. And this is limbo for him, since he is torn already and reduced to his athletic capabilities, which is clearly racist. In short, Jamal is again dismissed for his academic achievements and embraced for his basketball skill. Manhattan and the elite school suddenly turn into the Bronx again. Jamal and William fight because Forrester never made it clear the story had been published before and Jamal in turn broke his promise to never take anything written at the apartment with him. His reaction is both surprising and understandable. Jamal decides to lose the championship game on purpose and return to where he started out. It is William Forrester who decides to rescue his friend out of this situation.
Their friendship had been under stress after Jamal tried to make William see a basketball game at Madison Square Garden that led to a nervous breakdown and Jamal feels patronized and confronts William with his cowardice for retreating to his own world. At first glance it seems they merely exploited each other before, exchanging friendship for apprenticeship, but then their friendship is a lot stronger than that. The fight is a result of actual caring for each other, and when Terrell brings Forrester a letter his brother has written, the recluse feels called to action. When he surprises Jamal at the writing contest, which he believes will be his last day at the private school, he reads out a story written by Jamal as if it were his own and thus not only ridicules Crawford, who believes it is a story only a writer like Forrester could produce, but also enables Jamal to keep his scholarship and retain his confidence that he can actually make something out of his talent as a writer.
William Forrester is freed from his anxieties and this is emphasized by his new mobility. He is riding his old bike through the city, leaving his friend to his own device and departs for his home in Scotland. It is not only a physical but also a spiritual homecoming. It is also the last time William and Jamal are spending time together. A couple of months later Jamal is informed that William died of cancer and bequests his apartment to him. When Jamal and his family enter the apartment it looks like a museum and is strangely lifeless. As if it had lost its spirit. There is a manuscript that William wants Jamal to edit and publish, right at the open window that first separated them, then brought them together. Jamal goes down to the basketball court and plays with his friends and we feel sure William would’ve enjoyed that.
Finding Forrester is one of the few examples of films on writing/writers that are complex and visually astounding. It is the story of two friends but it is also about life, about racial, cultural and societal barriers that primarily exist in our heads, not in the real world. It is a film about a man in his room who took a different path than Paul Schrader’s characters. It is simply a complex masterpiece for almost everyone, that changes with the viewer’s personal experience. And that is quite an accomplishment.
