Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Factotum \fak-TOH-tuhm\, noun: A person employed to do all kinds of work or business [from the Latin fac totum, "do everything," from facere, "to do" (or to make) totus, "all."]

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The first problem FACTOTUM faces is that half the audience will not know what the title means. Which is perhaps why not many people have seen this obscenely entertaining film in theaters. The above definition may, in part, deal with that drawback. To be sure, the whimsical definition in my Epinion title is more germane to the movie, and we should not forget that the Latin verb "facere" is the origin of both the F-word and Fascism.

In fact, the Movie's hero is a man who "DOES NOT do all kinds of work or business." He just wants to drink and write . . . and -- there's the F-word again, but the latter activity, he implies, takes him away from the first two. Still the title is descriptive because few American films show someone actually Working: the grueling, monotonous, mindless process by which those who are lucky enough make their daily bread and Budweiser! And to his credit, Our Hero works at half a dozen jobs in FACTOTUM. He just gets fired from all of them.

Based on a novel by Charles Bukowski, FACTOTUM serves up in classic picaresque fashion a half-pound sliced deli selection from the life of Henry Chinaski. It expands more realistically on Barbet Schroeder's Bukowski film, BARFLY (1987). The casting of Irish-American Actor Matt Dillon as Bukowski's Eastern European-All American alter ego proves a brilliant choice. In his slow footed lope, his uncertain gaze, his depressed and depressing poetical observations, he prefigures the useless American-to-come of the Z-Generation.

[They have always been with us, in our larder, as American as rotten apples, but they must now be seeing the future because, soon, there will be virtually no more work for the young below the upper classes. Most of us are going to be replaced by robotics, or people in far places, and an elaborate socio-economic necromancy will have to be put over on generations to come, so they will perform peculiar tasks in order to keep the wheels of consumerism turning. These poor youngsters will neither read nor write, and, I reckon, U-Tube or dope will replace porno-films and booze. Yet, as a prototype for them, Henry (who does write, obsessively) is likable, pathetic, even tragic, and triumphantly funny as hell. O yes, he is also a woman-bashing, matter-of-fact psychopath, but that may be the norm of the future.]

We first meet Henry, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, some time after World War II, splintering huge blocks of ice with a jack hammer. His boss comes along, and snarls, "Drop that Chinaski. The driver hasn't showed up. I want you to take his route." Henry does as he is told -- he always just follows orders, to a point -- but the route leads, as Henry and his boss must know, through a row of old fashioned late 1940's beer joints, which still use crushed ice from the ice man. Henry cometh, but Henry goeth not. In his haste to enter the first bar, he carelessly leaves the massive door of the truck open.

Nearly an hour later, the boss finds him, still in the bar, and all the profit running down the gutter outside.

That disaster begins a series of jobs, some of which he holds longer than others: boxing brake shoes, driving cab, selling bicycle parts, sweeping out a newspaper office (the closest he comes to a position as a writer), dusting off a giant statue, etc. In every case, he is caught drinking on the job, coming in late, bugging out, being a no-show, or generally screwing up his duties. He reacts with hauteur, invective, and on couple of occasions with mayhem toward his foremen and managers.

Early in the picture, Henry meets the first (and most persistent) of his girlfriends, Jan (Lili Taylor) . . . where else? In a bar. They immediately find things in common -- cheap wine and . . . the F-word again. He moves in with her, and Jan, wearing only some remarkably lived-in underwear, makes him pancakes to keep his strength up, and to encourage him to find more work, in order to bring home more liquor.

When he is not carrying on these duties, Henry writes stories and poems -- laboriously, in long hand, page after page -- which when he is done, he seals in brown paper envelopes and sends off to The Black Sparrow Press (the outfit which eventually published the real Charles Bukowski). The manuscripts always come back, with a form letter, or once in a while, with (treasured among would-be writers) a hand-written rejection slip.

Several times, Henry is threatened by success, bizarre or unconventional success, but success. It invariably ruins his life and social order. On one job, for instance, he runs up against a horse player. They begin to go to the track after work, go to the track on their lunch hour, skip work to go to the track. Henry, with his deeply depressed intuition, is a natural at picking winners. [Or more to the point, recognizing all the losers.] Presently, he stops going to work, gets fired, half murders his boss, and begins lying around the apartment, getting on Jan's nerves.

One afternoon, to placate her, Henry takes Jan to the track. When he finds a man sitting in the seats which he considers reserved for them, Henry politely asks him to move. When the man tells Henry what he can do, Henry asks him politely again. More indifferent invective. The third time, Henry hammers the man quietly into coo-coo land, and in a snit, takes Jan home.

Jan soon throws him out.

Henry finds another job, and another girl. This time it's Laura (Marisa Tomei), who brings him to a beautifully appointed apartment. They are soon in the sack. Only later does Henry realize that she is a kind of shill for a French millionaire, an opera buff, Pierre (Didier Flamand), who lives with two other ladies: Terry (*Adrienne Shelly) and Grace (Karen Young). For reasons not entirely clear to me, Pierre sees almost as much in Henry as Laura does. He takes them all sailing on his yacht, out of Duluth, up on Lake Superior.

That's all too good to be true, and Henry swiftly flakes out on the relationship.

Then, it's back to Jan. Ånd on. Henry, when he's really frustrated, occasionally knocks her down. And on. He's an ordinary American guy, in many ways. And on. Henry doesn't even know it when he wins out in his greatest ambition, to be a published writer.

Henry can attest to Fred Allen's profound truth that, for most of us, Life is (the title of Allen's autobiography) "A Treadmill to Oblivion."

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I know that this film does not sound very edifying, certainly not PC, or socially uplifting, but in the hands of curiously named Nowegian Director Bent Hamer (KITCHEN STORIES, 2003) and his equally Norwegian Cinematographer John Christian Rosenlund, Henry Chinaski's shambling life, set off by muted American Northern Light, is unaccountably entertaining. Matt Dillon and Lili Taylor are rawly appealing. Marisa Tomei is at her "dream girl" best (though you wonder about her beaming from under the hulking, humping Chinaski). The rest of the unknown cast is fine.

And it helps that the adaptation was written by Jim Stark, the man who produced Jim Jarmusch's MYSTERY TRAIN (1989), that blackly wondrous meditation on the Elvis phenomenon and the American Character.

Whatever it may indicate about me, I liked FACTOTUM.

I suppose we should note that the real Henry Chinaski, Charles Bukowski -- after twenty years of slogging at the Post Office -- became one of the most read of modern American Writers.

To the extent that we read real books anymore.

What else can we say?

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UPDATE: December 26, 2006 -- FACTOTUM came out formally on DVD this week. In noting this milestone, it may be sadly appropriate that Adrienne Shelly, who played Terry in the film, was murdered in early November. An illegal immigrant construction worker has been arrested. It is alleged that after assaulting her, he hanged her body in the shower of her apartment, to make it look like a suicide. She was found by her husband. It may be a case of Life (nearly) immitating Art.



Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age