Auto Focus
Auto Focus, the new biopic chronicling the life and death of Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane, has, at its core, one big problem: This is the story about a man who is dead. No matter how you dress it up and parade it around, we all know how it’s going to end. How do you make a film that is compelling and relevant out of a man who was addicted to sex and murdered over 20 years ago? Let’s face facts: Bob Crane is no Forrest Gump. Fictional lives are always much more interesting than real ones. They’re not constrained by truth or actual events. It’s not like director Paul Schrader can insert Crane into grainy black and white footage of the Civil Rights movement or presidential press conferences, set to the music of Jackson Brown or CCR.
Schrader’s answer to that question is to make the story of Bob Crane’s life a cautionary tale about the dangers of temptation and success. To that end, Schrader drops us into his film in the early 60s, when Crane’s career as a successful radio Los Angeles DJ was taking off. His “life” seems pretty normal: a nice house, a beautiful wife (Rita Wilson) and three kids. What more could anyone want? Well, according to Auto Focus, Bob Crane, as played by Greg Kinnear, wanted to be the next Jack Lemmon. He fell short of that goal, but he did get his own sitcom, the aforementioned Heroes, which is where Auto Focus insinuates all of Crane’s troubles start. First, he is introduced to the man who would become Crane’s partner in crime, John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe). The friendship between the two men starts over an innocent discussion about electronics and pretty soon, the terrible twosome are joined at the hip, recording their sexual exploits on primitive home videos for their own personal gratification. Then, Crane begins an affair with one of his Hogan’s co-stars, Patti Olsen (Maria Bello), which puts the inevitable strain on his marriage. When the show goes off the air, and his marriage breaks up, at least he still has Carpenter to get him through the rough spots.
While watching Auto Focus, I couldn’t help notice that for a film that is so beautifully crafted, it is curiously not compelling. Schrader and his crew do a wonderful job or recreating the time period from the early 60s to the late 70s: The anonymous hotel rooms, the curious fashion choices, even the language seems firmly rooted in the period. The Hogan’s Heroes flashbacks are meticulously recreated, right down to the title fonts. But like the sex depicted on screen, the film left me cold. Crane’s life story is really no different than a drug addict’s: getting off on that first fix, then desperate to score, until it takes over his life, and ultimately destroys him. That downward spiral leaves you nowhere to go. As it finally does reach the end, the script seems to take giant leaps in time in order to fit everything in, leaving the viewer to fill in the blanks. By the time you get to Crane’s death, which is graphically recreated, you’re not even sure you care about these people anymore. I’m also curious to know why the sex tapes the duo view so often have been blurred on-screen rather than removed from the film. No one has mentioned this in any of the reviews I’ve read, but I found it really took me out of the story. If you’re going to show men commenting on the sex tapes they’ve made and then cut to a picture of the TV screen for the audience to see what the characters are talking about, actually show it.
Kinnear and Dafoe are quite good as Crane and Carpenter. Dafoe is, in fact, quite creepy. Kinnear seems an inspired choice to play Crane, putting a strange spin on the hipster attitude he cultivated when he was starting out E!’s Talk Soup. The two actors work together well to establish the bond that keeps these men together, yet ultimately tears them apart. Bello is quite good until she is relegated to being Mrs. Crane #2. Then, like Wilson, she is given little to do except keep house and complain about her husband’s lifestyle.
Ultimately, Auto Focus has a lot of theories about temptation, Hollywood, casual sex, and who killed Bob Crane and why, but it ultimately leaves the audience to draw its own conclusions about the man and his unconventional lifestyle. In the end, you just wish you were more interested in doing so.
Submitted 09 November 02. Posted 13 December 02.
